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Espresso Book Machine prints books on demand, while the customer waits

April 23, 2009

Times Online: Beginning next week a small revolution in bookselling will make searching for obscure, out-of-print and otherwise long-forgotten books a whole lot easier. Instead of checking in vain on Amazon and then spending weeks trawling the nation's second-hand bookshops, you will be able to go into a shop, say, "I would like a copy of North American Starfishes by Alexander Agassiz, please," and then watch it being printed out in a twinkling.

The bookseller Blackwell is installing a machine on a three-month trial at its store in London that can print out any one of about 400,000 titles within a few minutes. It prints something that looks like a book, feels like a book and, to all intents and purposes, is indistinguishable from the thousands of other titles on the shop's shelves (except for the hardbacks, of course, and the sort of blockbuster fiction that has the author's name on the front in big, raised, shiny letters, but then you can't have everything).

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