It’s going to be raining loose pages. The Espresso Book Machine, available for lease for a mere $1500/month to bookstores everywhere (according this Boston Globe article) prints, trims and perfect binds books on demand all in a machine about the size of an old-style copy machine. No fanning of pages, just milling on one pass and rollering glue on another.
I, for one, will be working on my dfa rebind skills. I predict a repeat of the early days of binding – people will buy an unbound book and bring it to US for fancifying for their shelves.
Or not. My library is about to embark on a book digitization project for which we do not have to pay, and I’m pretty sure the resulting POD books will be created in a manner similar to this. Do I have the ability to influence the way in which they are bound? Probably not. Will I reject the project? Nope.
Here is an interesting blog post from IF on the topic, the most intriguing aspect of which, to me, is the possibility of personal customization of book covers.
And here is what Gary Frost has to say.
Beth Heller Conservation LLC 