Last week, our distributing partner Lightning Source announced their pilot program with the Espresso 2 Book Machine (see the press release here). E-Reads is proud to be one of the first publishers in the program, which will see our titles available to the “ATM for books,” alongside offerings from Wiley, Hachette, McGraw-Hill, Simon & Schuster, and the University of California, among others.

We’ve always hoped that in the future we’d see mini-POD machines out in physical bookstores, making hard-to-find titles quickly accessible to customers who’d otherwise make special orders.

“Since the introduction of print on demand over a decade ago, I’ve dreamed of a day when the technology would be refined and reduced to in-store scale,” says E-Reads President Richard Curtis. “At last it’s here and I’m overjoyed at this significant moment in the evolution of the book industry. Now you can visit a bookstore, order a book online, and pick your copy up after a leisurely cup of coffee.”

Thanks to Lightning Source and On Demand Books, the Espresso 2 is the first time E-Reads has been able to make in-store book printing possible for our customers. The advance press materials will tell you that the Espresso 2 is a very practical and small machine that can print and bind paperback books in under 10 minutes. With a really fast optional Xerox copier and a short book, it gets the job done in about 5 minutes.

Last month, we took a quick trip to SoHo to see the offices of On Demand Books, where their prototype Espresso 2 print-on-demand machine was being demonstrated for publishers and retailers.

What we saw was a prototype the size of a squat refrigerator, with metal hydraulics pushing the paper around, whooshing and whirring as it shaved off the edges and glued the spine. Final shipping iterations of the Espresso 2 will use electric motors and reduce the noise. For now, the prototype’s pistons were all perfectly visible behind clear acrylic panels on the machine’s sides to demonstrate the mechanics. An inkjet printer on the top printed a color cover, a fast copier on the back printed out the interior pages, both of which get taken up inside and formed into a paperback while you watch. Then after a few minutes, out pops a little book from the dispenser, hot off the press (and a teensy-bit sticky until it dries).

Whitney Dorin, On Demand Book’s director of Business Development, made two copies for us on the spot, expertly checking on the process and helping the paper along (pictured above). The results were perfectly acceptable paperbacks, but everyone acknowledged that even though the covers look great (“They’re the most expensive part of the printing process,” she said), they don’t quite feel like your typical mass-produced covers because the heavy cover stock isn’t gloss or matte coated. In a best case scenario, many large scale print-on-demand operations give special attention to the covers and may even print them in advance, but the Espresso 2 is only a fraction of the size of those machines, so for now it looks like simple covers are a necessary trade-off.

Most of the printing components of the Espresso 2 seem modular, so that upgrading a machine to faster capabilities can be done relatively easily. Dane Neller, the CEO of On Demand Books, showed us how the Kyocera copier on the back could be swapped out for a Xerox 4112 copier capable of 110 pages per minute, accommodating books up to 830 pages long. Dane was very pleased to say that they had done all the work necessary to bring the printing costs down to a level where it was possible to see the machine pay for itself in about 9 months with daily printing.

Print-On-Demand technology really has come a long way in the past decade thanks to the hard work of Lightning Source and On Demand Books. It’s hard not to get grandiose visions of every school and bookstore having an Espresso printer, finally turning the page on hundreds of years of distribution problems for publishers. That revolution might be closer than you think.

- Michael Gaudet