A freshly-bound edition of Fyodor Dostoevsky's classic – ordered by The Daily Telegraph – was one of the first tomes to drop out of the Espresso Book Machine when it opened for business for the first time yesterday.
The novel is one of more than 400,000 titles including many rare and out-of-print books that can be printed on demand at Blackwell bookshop on Charing Cross Road in central London.
The Blackwell PR is here:Blackwell, the UK’s leading academic bookseller, has unveiled the launch of the 2.0 Espresso Book Machine (EBM) at its flagship store, 100 Charing Cross London. It is the first bookshop installation of its kind within the UK, allowing any book to be selected from an inexhaustible network of titles and prints on demand in just 3 minutes from a digital file onsite, online at www.blackwell.co.uk, or uploaded in person from CDs or flash drives.
The Guardian notes its arrival at the London Book Fair - ah, nothing like a fair to give a warm embrace to carefully tended machines promising a shiny, warm, slighly aromatic future:The brainchild of American publisher Jason Epstein, the Espresso was a star attraction at the London Book Fair this week, where it was on display to interested publishers. Hordes were present to watch it click and whirr into action, printing over 100 pages a minute, clamping them into place, then binding, guillotining and spitting out the (warm as toast) finished article. The quality of the paperback was beyond dispute: the text clear, unsmudged and justified, the paper thick, the jacket smart, if initially a little tacky to the touch.
On Demand Books has the obligatory video.
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