Espresso Book Machine

Today I met the Espresso Book Machine, at Harvard Books on Mass Ave in Cambridge. It's the only one in Massachusetts, and was closer than the one in Manchester, VT. From the online documentation I've found, the Espresso is a fraction of the size of the Xerox machines that provide POD.

Current technical drawbacks to the EBook machine. The bookstore currently has access only to public domain titles. Even though my first novel, Weathermen, was POD, it was not available. I asked and was told that access to POD titles is currently very limited. Only Lightning Source (Baker and Taylor) titles are at all available, and there are still some glitches, so access to titles remains a big hurdle to in-store book creation. To see the machine in operation I had to pick from public domain titles. I tried George Orwell, hoping for one of my favorites, but one of a very few options was Animal Farm.

Second technical drawback. The machine does require hot glue to bind each book, and however fast a computer may boot up, glue must be reheated in the physical world. My wife and I waited an hour (they thought it would be sooner when we started, and when it took longer we decided to wait it out). The machine ordinarily gets enough business from the neighborhood scholars seeking out of print titles; we were the victims of a warm Saturday. The Xerox printer spit out the pages in under a minute (172 pages). The entertainment value is watching the cover printed on a separate, color printer, then watch the pages run over the glue roller, then tucked snugly into the cover, pinched tight, then run over a tiny router that trims the book. The book is dropped into a spout and it appears like candy bought in a vending machine. The entertainment value of watching a book being made is evident in that the Espress machine's sides and top are transparent plastic.

I don't mind too terribly that we got a parking ticket waiting for the glue to get hot enough...