My local independent bookstore got one of those, and has used it to bring back a bunch of out-of-print books on local history. Pretty cool.

Cool!

An improvement would be if it accepted text in XML-FO format, so the buyer could select a page size, font, and font size at will.
Any requests for "A Brief History of Time" in Comic Sans?

The New York Public Library had one of these on display, maybe a couple of years ago (maybe more than that!). You could choose from a list of books, and they would print one for you while you watched the machines do their thing.

I asked for a copy of Flatland, but it was a scan of a very old edition, with a Microsoft logo at the bottom of every page (because Microsoft was involved with a project to scan books in the public domain)!

@ de Jong & Cordoba: Interesting. You just mentioned two of my favorite books…

this is print-on-demand, folks.

welcome to the present.

-bowerbird

Yeah, but where does the coffee come out?

You can read more about the parent company, On Demand Books.

don said:
> Yeah, but where does the coffee come out?

around on the left side, toward the top, right above
the slot where the grilled cheese sandwich comes out.

-bowerbird

The only downside that the book is printed with toner and not with the less reflective ink of book presses. I recently bought a book from amazon that was printed on demand. It was printed with ink not toner, but the scan was somewhere around the neighborhood of only 300-400dpi. More readable than the pdf on my screen of course, but janky nonetheless. If this machine uses pdfs with embedded fonts or 1200 dpi scans, I imagine customers will be happy. There should be a warning if the file you're printing from is less than 600 dpi.

Also, their home page has a new video for a "2.0" version: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDe_Jy4HnMY

There are also other photos on the web of models in use, such as here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/6205386/Google-Espresso-pro...

The machine is ugly and not friendly at all, unlike those trashy but easy photo kiosks. There needs to be a counter/shelf under the keyboard (I'm looking at the telegraph article) for people to put their backpack/pocketbook and coffee on. Otherwise you feel like a tool standing in front of that thing.

> If this machine uses pdfs with embedded fonts or 1200 dpi scans, I imagine customers will be happy.

The way I read it, the system will use whatever is available. Many out-of-print books exist only as scans, often at 200 or 300 dpi, due to the size of a raster-based book file.

I suspect that quality will vary widely. But if the book is something that has been out-of-print for 30 years, and you really want it, 200 dpi is better than nothing.

If you order a ristretto, do you get a condensed book?

Or half the amount of ink on a page ;)

I think my FontLab printed manual is one of those. (It comes in 2 volumes).

Nick Cooke

nice, but I wonder how well these machines do their job on a daily basis…