Dead Trees Strike Back!

Someone pointed me at the online edition of Forbes, which features an article about an independent bookstore that is, contrary to about every other independent bookstore in the country, thriving in the current ebook-saturated environment.

Jeff Mayersohn, the new owner of the Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge, managed to create a bookstore even more efficient than Amazon.

How?  He installed an Espresso Book Machine, a small printing press that can take a digital file and produce a perfect-bound hard copy in something like four minutes. It even takes care of sending royalties to the right person.

(I sorta want one of these for my house.)

The EBM has access to something like five million titles (none of them, I suspect, mine).  And at the Harvard Bookstore, you don’t even have to show up at the bookstore to get your book.

If you live in Cambridge and neighboring communities, you can order online and get any book delivered the same day by an eco-friendly Metroped “pedal-truck,” or a bicycle, as I like to call them.

Even Amazon takes overnight.

There’s been a lot of money and attention sunk into print-on-demand technology— Borders put a lot of money into it, to no discernible result— but here it is, finally. And it’s not just at Harvard Books, it’s at Blackwells, McNally-Jackson, and others.

Can you imagine one of these in every library in the world?

You can now run a bookstore out of a kiosk, and more efficiently than Barnes & Noble in a big box shopping-mall store.  You cut the distributor out of the mix, and— at least in the case of out-of-copyright works— the publisher, too.  More profit for the entrepreneur, cheaper books for the masses.

And in the very near future, the bookstore kiosk sits next to the kiosk with the 3D printer that can print any tool or toy in the world.

Which is next to the pharmacy that can print any drug?  (Yeah, they’re working on that.)

(And which will finally bid a farewell to our stupid drug laws.)

Here’s the EBM in action.

You take your drugs, I’ll take mine.