As you may already know, Google has been spending the last seven years scanning their hearts out, digitizing more than two million books that are old enough to be part of the public domain. They turn them into searchable documents, making many rare and hard to find books accessible for anyone with access to the Internet.
And now they’ve just outdone themselves. In Ryan Singer’s Wired article, he reports on the new partnership between Google and On Demand books. They’ve teamed up so that now you can have any of those digital books turned into paperbacks, printed for you at any bookstore with an Espresso Book Machine. That machine will pump out a book complete with a cover color in around four minutes. Say you want a book from the 20’s about the etched potholes of Texas. Instead of Ebay, you can watch that thing come hot off the press at your local bookstore. The suggested retail for the book will be around eight dollars, with three dollars going to the retailer, a dollar going to On Demand and another to Google, which they are donating to charity.
The Harvard Bookstore will even print one out for you and deliver it to you by bicycle!
Want to watch that bad boy in action? Here’s a video of the espresso book machine cranking one out.
