> > When at Powell's in Portland, they had a Print and Bind on Demand system, > I think they were mainly offering works from Project Gutenberg (Copyright > free, cost of printing only) but maybe some others. It is an idea that > would have been powerful 20 years ago... but... I'm afraid with eBooks > today it may be no more than an eclectic Anachronism. >
No, that's silly. A certain [large] subset of people nowadays are *always* saying how they often prefer physical books because of the feel, the smell, the weight. Often it is the same people who use ebooks, suggesting they serve different use cases. As the digital world encompasses more of our life, it is important we be able to easily transition back and forth between physical to semantic objects - in the case of books, that includes not only quickly and nondestructively digitizing them, but also taking volume printing from the purview of publishers strictly, to individuals (as has been the case for small-volume prints). The Espresso Book Machine <http://ondemandbooks.com/> has caused a lot of discussion, but it is limited by a proprietary library (although if you want to work at hand-formatting, you can use public domain texts), a high cost, and low book quality (it is just intended so that university libraries and such can have copies of out-of-print books, after all). It is hard to put lots of well-formatted words on lots of well-bound sheets of paper quickly, a nontrivial problem. However, if individual presses become the next big thing like 3D printers are now, I think innovation could find a way. Already high speed scanning is being worked on by hobbyists: DIY <http://www.diybookscanner.org/>. And it is not like small presses have not existed for hundreds of years (there is one in the Eldorado library), they are just not automated. -Arlo James Barnes
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