The City Section of the New York Times decides it might be a good idea to trek on over to the New York Public Library and check out that newfangled piece of equipment, the Espresso Book Machine. Also along to gawk were three visitors – a graduate student, a Hong Kong publishing executive and a sixth grader – who stood in various states of awe as a Rube Goldberg contraption produced a book from digital code to hefty paperback in under 15 minutes. It’s one of only three machines in existence (with another in Washington and a third in Alexandria, Egypt) but the company that produces is is pitching the book machine, which may eventually sell for $20,000 or more, principally toward the nation’s 16,000 public libraries and 25,000 bookstores.
Gan Qi, an executive with the Chinese University Press of Hong Kong, thinks the EBM will help solve one problem. “This will keep small publishers from going bankrupt.” The graduate student, Cyrus Luhr, wonders how the machine might affect the future of the bookstore. “It can’t replace it because it can’t replace the atmosphere of a bookstore.” And as for Leysly Avila, 10, the sixth grader, visiting from Vancouver, she likes the machine because “you get to see how a book is made.”