What might Pam Beesly see in the Espresso Book Machine?
Photo via The Guardian
An Espresso Book Machine, whose name is more sophisticated than its appearance, just debuted at Blackwell's Charing Cross Road branch in London. Creators of the 2007 Time Invention of the Year say that their machine enables smaller bookstores to have the opportunity to compete with stock-holding shops and Amazon. A contentious claim. What is certain is that Blackwell's customers can now access almost half a million books including a fascimile of the original manuscript of Alice in Wonderland. Lucky Londoners! The company is working with publishers in the UK to increase access to in-copyright writings. It hopes to have over a million titles by the end of the summer, or an astounding alleged equivalent of 23.6 miles of shelf space. That is just a few more than the 200 titles the World Bank's InfoShop inaugurated in April 2006. Libraries as well are employing the Espresso as a major space saver: in September the University of Michigan proudly announced itself as the first university to purchase the machine. Mind you, the library's offering is limited to printed and out-of-copyright books from its digitized collection of nearly 2 million, and thousands of books from the Open Content Alliance and other digital sources.* Let's hope this dream-machine isn't ultimately corrupted to a nightmare of self-publishing?
*The Espresso purchase PR is since dwarfed by highlights on self-healing concrete, a spine-tingling vest, and how a baby mammoth study validated a researcher.
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