Books Redeployed.

Posted on | January 19, 2009 | No Comments

Sometimes we stumble on ideas in the places we least expect to find them.

The OECD is full of bright ideas that often seem to be left hanging.

The OECD in its work on sustainable development talks about the idea of books on demand.

I do not want to suggest that the bookstore is going to die or even be challenged.But the the idea of OnDemandBooks is pretty basic.

What Gutenberg’s press did for Europe in the 15th century digitization and the Espresso Book Machine will do for the world tomorrow.

Library quality paperbacks at low cost, identical to factory made books, printed direct from digital files for the reader in minutes, serving a radically decentralized world-wide multilingual marketplace. In essence, an ATM for books.

Where is this going?

All sorts of new places to sell books!

How about setting up the book machine in a library to sell other books or copies of the books that students might like to own?

What about using this machine to print textbooks?

The fact of the matter is books still play a vital role in both our informative and entertainment complex and the ondemandbook might actually change the way we think of that very old technology that seems to constantly reinvent itself.

Who says the publishing industry is dead?