Word: bookings
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...recently visited the Harvard Book Store to catch a glimpse of its newly acquired Book Espresso Machine, the $100,000 apparatus that can print a fully bound, 300-page book in four minutes...
...book machine is well worth a look: It actually comprises two machines. One resembles an industrial-sized copier, and the other reminds me of that baroque execution device from Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony.” A transparent casing surrounds the latter half, affording a view of the various gears, clamps, trays, and rollers in action...
...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...