From The Network Is Your Customer (Rogers, Yale University Press, forthcoming [2010]):An even greater impact on the book industry may come from the arrival of custom-printing kiosks, such as the Espresso. This “ATM for books” can print a hundred pages a minute and bind the pages into a finished book on a machine that will fit in the corner of a local bookstore. The first Espresso in Europe appeared in the famed Blackwell’s bookshop in central London, where it expanded the bookstore’s famously large selection with an additional half-million titles, ready to print from digital files. A customer coming in to find Charles Darwin’s out-of-print book on earthworms was able to print a copy in minutes for about twenty dollars (instead of paying a thousand dollars on the secondhand market for rare books). The first Espresso in the United States was in the homey Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vermont. The store found that many aspiring authors came in to print short runs of their own unpublished books once they found out they no longer needed an established publisher to accept their manuscript. As its digital library expands, the Espresso will allow small, local bookstores like Northshire to offer just as many niche books as an online powerhouse like Amazon.
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http://www.ondemandbooks.com/home.htm
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What great news for authors. And what's great news for authors should be great news for authors who want to put out quality books. Are you an author wanting to self-publish? Don't forget quality control. Have the book copyedited. Pay a professional to proofread it. Are you putting out a family history or a work of nonfiction? For your readers' benefit, the book needs an index. Whether you come to me or someone else, do your audience a favor and make the book the best it can be. Your future readership will grow as a result, and you'll be prouder of your past output when you look back at it.
A word to the wise.
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