One of the things that stood out for me at the London Book Fair was the Espresso book vending machine. Alison Flood of The Guardian‘s book blog was also fascinated, and has written this article about the machine’s move to its new home in Blackwell’s bookstore in Charing Cross Road.
It cost Blackwell some $175,000, but the bookseller believes it will make this back in a year.
Assuming the reliability is good, I guess.
Reliability would be the question for me.
Volume photocopiers tend to need maintenance weekly or more. Perfect binders need constant tweaking. Cutters need realignments and sharpening. I
I figure putting all these complex tools in one box certainly won’t reduce the likelihood of failure… will it compound?
1. What Daniel said.
2. I want one. It was cool enough to have a comb-binder at home, this looks cooler.
3. Five minutes? Hah. That’s five minutes for the first customer in line. After that, it goes up. Assuming it’s working (see #1).
I didn’t see, though – is it full color? I probably missed that. I do hope it’s a success because it’s cool.
It could definitely be a competition for amazon if you can walk in to any large bookstore and order “anything”. But then it also is competition for all press houses.
Hmmm. We knew it was coming. It’ll be interesting to see what happens now it’s starting to be here.
Bob: $175,000 to buy. Plus maintenance. Plus consumables. Plus operation. Plus fees for printing non-public domain materials. Alll of which is OK for major, successful big box booksellers.
Most other bookstores aren’t even WORTH $175,000 at this point.
The economic are such that I estimate in store PoD will cost about the same as offset to the customer and introduce a LOT more headaches for the store once the novelty wears off.
Don’t get me wrong- there are thousands of ways kiosk PoD makes sense- but it is either inside big box stores (MallWart, CostCo, B&N) or instead of small indy booksellers.