Thermal

What a fantastic idea: On Demand Books

According to the article where I found out about this, OnDemand Books (ODB? – wasn’t he in the Wu-Tang Clan? Perhaps they could have thought this through better) are looking to install these machines in libraries and other places. You find the book you want, select page quality options and a few other bits, and in about seven minutes, the machine will print, glue and bind the book and you can take it away. Not only this, it can do two at once, in any language and can even bind for those languages that are read right to left. Amazing.

This is a great idea and one I hope takes off. For now they are limited to about 1 million out of copyright books as indexed by Google, but they state that  within 5 years they will be able to re-create any book ever printed. Which will be quite a feat for those works that went up in smoke in the Library of Alexandria, but I think I know what they mean. Price will be around $0.01 per page, which is certainly cheaper than it is now. I’d use them.

Have a look at the article where I found this story – it lists 9 other innovations for 2007, including 6′ Roses, taking power from rivers, removable tattoos and more.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 25th, 2007 at 11:44 am and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.