Printing of books on paper is inefficient enough now, and just environmentally speaking, it is a practice we should be curtailing as much as possible, now that there is a viable (and more environmentally benign) alternative. And the expresso machines, though convenient, do not have efficiency on their side: In the long run, printing books one-at-a-time is less efficient than printing them en masse. (Of course, there’s a lot of waste in en masse printing, but this is industry-supported and capable of being cut back.)

So, keep the browsing kiosks. Add a few shelves for the books du jour for people to peruse. But sell them as e-books, and leave the paper on the trees.

http://www.fictioncircus.com/news.php?id=407&mode=one

I’ve been thinking about the Espresso Book Machine primarily from a writing and publishing perspective for months now, and I think they are an exciting extension of (and correction to) the purely ebook publishing model:

http://fictioncircus.com/news.php?id=365&mode=one

The design makes sense as a place to WAIT, but not to browse. Bookstores are places to browse, cafes are places to wait — indeed, that’s all Starbucks and other coffee places think about in the design of their stores, in terms of making it pleasant to wait for a drink.

I don’t think on-demand bookstores are as practical as Moriah believes they will be. The estimates of wait times for a POD book always assume optimal performance and perfect demand (no more orders than the book machine can make in any given time), when retail is a highly inefficient setting characterized by long waits whenever business improves. See: http://booksahead.com/?p=329. It’s never “GOOD TO GO,” but usually “you’ll need to wait a bit longer.”

The question not addressed here is the cost of the space and technology for selecting the book one would like printed. If all the espresso seats have a screen, each sharing one-fourth of a workstation and there is a need for more than two POD machines, the upfront cost of the design would run somewhere north of $45,000, with ongoing costs for leasing the machines, point-of-sale systems and so forth. I’m not sure that is going to make sense to a retailer.

Nolan Bushnell gave a speech about the future of retailing at DIgital World in 1994 that anticipated this scenario. It assumed people would go to places to browse, then order for home delivery. That model didn’t come to pass, because there was no link between browsing costs assumed locally and the potential revenue from actual sales (one could go online and order from someone else for a better price). The bookstore of screens ONLY doesn’t really enable browsing — which I think will take place from home.

Not only that — how about we become less genteel and a bit more crass, and fill the walls of the place with video screens looping lurid ads and trailers for books? With clips of authors reading from their works?

However, if you want the real genius ideas, scroll down into the comments of the post itself (hint, they’re not my ideas). I’m not dismissing the idea of an old-fashioned bookstore (which I clearly stated would be on the second floor). I’m saying that the bookstore would PURCHASE their inventory outright (MMP/HB), thereby curating according to its customers’ tastes.

On Twitter this morning, Kat Meyer said something to the effect that with my (admittedly, very rough) model, the bookseller would become a “book concierge,” which I see as a small but affordable luxury.

Also in the comments just today, there was an interesting variation on the concept of reinventing the bookstore: A Fantasia.

The opportunity for integrating bookshelves with print books, ebooks, e-reading devices, and POD (you are somewhere; you whip out your iPhone and make an order direct to the local Espresso machine, then pick it up), and food/drink and baubles/shiny things, so a bookstore can become more than a place to sit all day and read a book is just too seductive an idea for me to let go of. It has the possibility of making a local bookshop the community’s Place To Go (especially for casual e-book consumers).

I am NOT dissing bookstores. I want them to thrive and grow, and I think the way to do that is to exploit every possible area of bookdom.

Here’s an article by Lisa Scott about the British version of read dating .

http://portland.readinglocal.com/2009/07/09/reading-local-essay-indie-bookstores-of-the-future/#more-3384

The original concept of having virtually no inventory and looking through the Baker & Taylor/Ingram catalog fails, in my mind, because it is little different from ordering over the Internet, except that I have to go to the Quaint Bookstore. It is the rare book that I cannot wait a couple of days for it to arrive from B&N.com.

I think where the independent bookstores fail are in their efforts to compete directly with Amazon and B&N (I’m not sure that Borders or Books-a-Million count very much anymore). Instead they need to change their focus and introduce readers to the unknown authors — the POD/self-published/small press lists. Let the James Patterson books be sold at Amazon and B&N because they will sell them at prices the independent can’t match (they should be available, however, via the Espresso-type and ebook options in the Quaint Bookstore).

I will add that the idea of having a variety of ebook devices for sale is a good one. How about renting them out with a couple of rented books on them? Kind of like becoming the Blockbuster/Netflix of books.

A vision of the future of entertainment retailing, announced yesterday by I.B.M. and Blockbuster Entertainment, could do away with sprawling stores, aisles and aisles of offerings, and back rooms full of inventory — be it the latest Michael Jackson recordings, Arnold Schwarzenegger video releases or Nintendo games.

In a few years, even a small-town record shop might offer all the titles of the biggest big-city megastore — not on hand, but summoned from the digital files of big computers thousands of miles away, traveling as electronic impulses to machines in the store that copy recordings or movies on blank CD’s or videocassettes.

I.B.M. and the Blockbuster Entertainment Corporation announced a partnership yesterday to jointly pursue this vision. The computer giant and the entertainment retailer will work on developing the new distribution technology for use in-house by Blockbuster, which has nearly 3,500 video and music stores. The technology would also be sold to other retailers.

The project was a grand failure. The entertainment conglomerates refused to license content to the system, and the retailers were obdurate. One can trace the idea of media-on-demand further back to the age of audiocassettes:

In 1988, the Personics Corporation set up computerized kiosks in Tower Records/Video stores that let shoppers make customized audiocassette tapes. But the systems failed to maintain popularity, in part because Personics had trouble getting licensing rights from record companies, and the company wound up in bankruptcy court in 1991.

Here is an example of books-on-demand from 1990 courtesy of rogue professors:

When Kinko’s Graphic Corp. decided to start photocopying course materials and binding them into pamphlets for college professors and students, company officials did not realize the popular service would lead to a copyright suit with major implications for the quick printing industry.

Kinko’s has managed to get caught in the crossfire between textbook publishers who do not want stores to make unauthorized copies and professors who would prefer to photocopy a few choice pages than force a student to pay $30 or more for the textbook.

Steward Brand said “information wants to be expensive”, but people prefer to quote his companion aphorism that “information wants to be free”.