Word: booking
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...surprise, only a bare few onlookers actually seemed interested in buying something made by the machine. The male graduate student ordered a Spanish-language book on aesthetic theory; I bought a Victorian novel. It felt warm in my hands—literally hot off the press. Most people, however, were content to “ooh” and “aah” and feel as if they had witnessed a bit of print history...
...whether this technology means very much for booksellers, but the tepidness I saw in the other patrons made me doubt that it does. Even if the digital inventory expands far beyond the stock of out-of-copyright titles that the machine currently prints, I have to wonder whose book ownership needs are so extensive and obscure that they cannot be met by Amazon.com or the local bookstore. One answer, of course, is academics and bookworms—real constituencies, to be sure, but ones whose pent-up demand, alas, seems unlikely to revolutionize the business...
...those academics and bookworms, however, what a coup this machine is! One can almost begin to imagine the fulfillment of that utopian dream held by book collectors since at least the 15th century: a comprehensive, universal library—a single place where nearly every surviving printed book in English can be accessed within minutes. Perhaps they will still cost, but they will be available, all of them, in print...
...prospect, though, I can’t help but feel a measure of nostalgia, already, mixed with my exhilaration. Last summer, I spent a glorious week in Dublin at the National Library of Ireland, reading dusty volumes of 18th-century pamphlets for my thesis. In the world after Google Books has conquered all libraries and the Book Espresso Machine has delivered them all to bookstores around the country, will such trips even be necessary...
...Book Espresso Machine, Google Books, and the myriad other print digitization schemes now afoot carry the danger of turning research into something that can be conducted without ever leaving the compass of one’s local bookstore—or even one’s desk. Surely the heyday of the academic as an explorer, an adventurer, traveling to distant libraries in search of rare and exotic books, has already passed. But must technology wipe away all vestiges of that former side to the vocation...