Gizmodo: digital books

Espresso Book Machine to Print Books on Demand, No Lattes

Jesus Diaz — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 09:00:00 EDT

The Espresso Book Machine—which actually is a self-contained 150 pages-per-minute printing and binding machine—can produce a full book in five minutes from a catalog of 400,000 references. It only takes one button.

With online book sales going up fast and electronic books taking off, publishing company Blackwell has decided to cut costs down and bring a huge back catalog with 400,000 volumes to the hands of readers. Or so they hope.

High-speed all-in-one printing-and-binding machines are not new, but this idea is. Using the Espresso Book Machine, any customer can walk in, pick any book from a touchscreen (or bring its own in CD or USB stick,) and walk away with a "real book" in five minutes. The price? Around $43 for a 300-page out-of-copyright book.

According to the company, this is the future of book distribution, allowing readers to get out-of-print volumes on the spot, rather than having to wait an online purchase to arrive or, worse, hunt them down in second-hand shops.

Obviously, Blackwell may be ignoring that little thing called Kindle. Fortunately for them—and unfortunately for trees everywhere—so are most readers worldwide. [Daily Mail]

Rumor: Amazon Kindle 2 Coming This Fall

Matt Hickey — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 21:20:51 EDT

CrunchGear's got it on good authority that the next year or so will see not only an update to the current model—making it thinner and lighter—but also an altogether new model with dimensions something like a piece of loose leaf paper. They should come out in October and sometime next year, respectively, though no word on pricing. To try to sway the youth market, it's said the new Kindle will come in trendy new colors. [CrunchGear, that is not a photo of the Kindle 2]

Google Adding Maps to Books, Ads to Follow?

Matt Buchanan — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 14:00:56 EST

Google's been busy this week, and they're wrapping it up by mixing Google Books with Google Maps. Locations listed in certain books will have a link to that same location in Google Maps, so you can, um, check it out on a map. It's kind of cool, I guess, at least with some of the titles, like Around the World in Eighty Days and The Travels of Marco Polo.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that Google's "animat[ing] the static information" in books, though. It's just dropping links in the middle of a book. I'm sure something more worthwhile will come out of this down the line, however. Like contextual advertising. – Matt Buchanan

Google meshes books and maps online [Yahoo!/AP]

Google Announces Plan to Open Online Bookstore; World Domination Details to Follow

Matt Buchanan — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 08:45:42 EST

We knew that the beta of Google Book Search really was, for once, just a beta version of a much grander project. Now we know what that project is. BusinessWeek is reporting that Google has disclosed to publishers its intentions to expand its Book Search beyond a mere search and preview service into one where users will be able to purchase access to entire copies of books, and possibly download them to other devices.

There are, however, some roadblocks. Reaching agreements with the publishers themselves is naturally the most pressing issue in terms of acquiring content to sell, but we'll wager it's an issue not far from resolution, given Google's public disclosure of their plans. The book industry writ large, however, is obviously uneasy about the kind of access and distribution Google looks to bring to book content — the Authors Guild lawsuit against Google mentioned in the article makes this clear.

It's debatable, though whether relatively mediocre digital book sales are a content issue or a hardware issue — will more (and better) books that are more easily accessible fuel sales or do we have to wait for the "iPod device of the book"? It looks like time — and Google — will tell. – Matt Buchanan

Google Download: No iTunes for Books [Businessweek]
image via Sevens Heaven