Print-on-Demand is due to come to the high street in the UK later this year thanks to Blackwells. The bookstore chain is set to install “an ATM for books” in one of its branches (yet to be decided, but I think Charing Cross Road is a good bet, as is their HQ in Oxford). So you’ll be able to stick your credit card in the machine and select a book from over 400,000 titles (mainly from Lightning Source), and a few minutes later a brand new, freshly printed book will be available for you to take away.
All we need now is for the machine to be able to produce “Earl Grey, hot, black” as well, and it will be perfect. (Or perhaps “grande mocha no whip”.)
But here’s my question: will the books smell newly printed? I don’t know what “newly printed” smells like, but I have a sneaking suspicion that a good smell would be a killer marketing gimmick.
I remember checking out a vending machine at Glasgow Airport, full of novels. Vaguely recall only one SF title and the rest were ‘standard popular’ titles, certainly none that I would buy.
Yep, but that’s because it only contained pre-printed books, which take up a lot of space. If you had a choice of 400,000 books then you might find more books if interest.