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Does electronic publishing technology mean the end of the paper book? Not at all, argues Clive Thompson on Wired.com. Just as the “paperless office” actually used more paper than ever, the advent of self-publishing technologies like the Espresso Book Machine means that people will have the ability to create custom one-off books for every situation.

It’s a bit of an obvious insight to us, of course, but the piece does have some interesting anecdotes about the ways the Espresso can be used. For example:

Print-on-demand books can also become plastic—altered on the fly to suit each reader. For his self-published motivational book, Bobby Bakshi, a former Microsoft employee who now does corporate consulting, writes a different intro for each client. Over at the University of Alberta, the bookstore hosted a talk by former Canadian prime minister Kim Campbell. Her book was out of print, so the store used its Espresso machine to run off fresh copies—with a new cover and two new chapters that Campbell wrote for the event.”We can take almost any whimsy and turn it into a book,” says Vladimir Verano, who runs the Espresso machine at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, Washington.

Similarly, the MU bookstore employees I spoke to who run the Espresso machine in Columbia, Missouri said that they could and did run off books for local authors who brought in their own PDF files.

So, Thompson says, it’s likely that paper books will continue to be with us for a good long time. Even if the big publishers wean themselves off of them, small publishers will find print-on-demand solutions are exactly what they’ve been looking for to reach those people who don’t read electronically.

3 COMMENTS

  1. There is something of a mirror between popularizations of ebooks and print-on-demand books. Both started in enclaves of simulation of each other; ebooks mimic the paper book experience and print-on-demand needs digital technology and electronic files. Their mutual rise in popularity also has similarity; both went through fragmented implementation and commercialization now being overcome.

    Both ebooks and print-on-demand also have plenty of room for growth and new marketeering. I am just back from the International Spanish language Book Fair, it is obvious that this print dominated market will itself support explosive development for both screen and paper book innovation.

    Another suggestion is a possible (charmed?) 50-50 split in paper and screen delivery for books going forward. This would further suggest an inherent interdependence of the two delivery systems and an inherent integration of the book publishing industry overall.

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