Two copies
of
14. How are they
different...?
I’m
guessing most of you reading this have heard of the Espresso Machine. Simply put, it’s an ATM for books. You select the manuscript you want and the
machine prints it up for you right there on the spot.
In theory,
this is cool on a couple levels. For
bookstores, it means they’ve got access to a much larger potential
inventory. I think for most of us, when
we go to a bookstore and get told “we can order it for you,” that’s usually the
signal to go home and order what we want on Amazon. With an Espresso Machine, the bookstore gets
to say “we don’t have it in stock, but we can print it up for you in fifteen
minutes.”
That’s just
a few steps off from replicator technology.
For writers,
especially traditionally published authors, it means paperbacks never need to
go out of print. There are tens of
thousands of books out there that aren’t financially viable for a publisher to
bring back (last numbers I heard said a book needs to sell over five thousand
copies a year to be worth keeping in print), but could still gather random
sales. And sales means income. Authors with a large back-catalog could
suddenly be getting regular checks again when a dozen books sell twenty or
thirty copies each. Not phenomenal
money, but definitely better than the nothing the books are making when out of
print.
All pretty
nifty, yes?
Well, about six weeks back I was up at
Village Books in Bellingham, Washington, and I
got to take their Espresso Machine for a whirl.
Not only that, their resident Espresso expert, Brendan, was willing to talk with me for about half an hour, going over the machine and
the whole process from beginning to end.
So I decided to get a copy of
14 through the machine and
see what came out.
The
Espresso Machine at Village Books is one of the first ones put out, and
the
first one on the west coast. It’s about
two years old (on a three year, rent-to-own lease), and Brendan’s trying to
convince the owners to trade up to the new model in a year when the lease is
up. The newer one has worked out some
small bugs and also goes a bit faster (most books are done in closer to ten
minutes). Keep that in mind as you read
through this.
First off,
the machine is a bit more cobbled-together looking than you might expect. The front is a terminal. The back looks a lot like an oversized
photocopier, the type you’d find in an office or Kinkos. In between is a glassed-in section with robot
clamps, hydraulic blades, and shifting platforms that assemble the book. It’s
kind of like a computer and a printer having a threeway with one of the robots
from Tony Stark’s workshop.
So, Brendan
ordered a copy of 14 for me.
It’s not a book that’s stored on the machine’s hard drive, so it takes a
few minutes just to download that file (they’re kind of big).
It’s also
worth noting that this download costs almost nine dollars. This is where pricing comes into play. The final cost of the book is based off
download costs (if any), raw materials (the Espresso machine goes through
high-end paper just like a copier, so big books cost more than small books), and the store’s profit margin. In the case of 14, this
actually means the final book ends up costing just shy of $19.00 through the
Espresso (four bucks over the publisher’s suggested retail price). There are lots of public domain books that
are inexpensive, though, and it also works well for some of their more direct
publishing relationships (local authors, local schools and colleges).
The cover
gets printed first. It’s usually getting
the most color and it’s on glossy paper.
It ends up face down at the bottom of the assembly area.
Then the
machine starts printing pages. It’s just
like watching a copier or high end computer printer. And, just like these machines, sometimes
there are mess-ups. One page comes out
just a little off, as does the next and the next and the next, and suddenly
instead of a neat stack of paper there’s a broad fan. This actually happened on the book the
machine was printing right before mine.
Brendan had to pause everything and shuffle things back into place. He does try to check on the machine while
it’s working, but every now and then something sneaks by.
Once the
pages are all printed, the next step is the gluing. The manuscript is squeezed together and the
machine paints a stripe of hot glue along it.
Then the whole thing is pressed down into the cover, which is pressed
down into a gap in the floor of the machine (again, all of it shifting and
adjusting in a very
Iron Man way).
The robot arm presses from above, the gap clamps tight from below, and
the pages are glued into the cover. On
rare occasions the machine puts down too much glue and makes a mess of things,
and if that does happen it could mean starting over.
Once the
glue’s been given a few minutes to dry, the machine moves on to cutting. All of this is printed on 8 1/2” x 11” paper,
so it needs to be snipped down to size.
The arm spins the book, a new opening appears in the floor of the
machine, and a hydraulic blade shears off the excess material. It’s kind of scary how effortlessly the
machine cuts through almost 200 sheets of paper. The book’s rotated and cut until all the page
measurements are correct.
And that’s
it. The arms carry the book over and
drop it out a slot on the right side of the machine. At the end, it took just shy of fifteen
minutes from placing the order until the finished book pops out.
For the
record, the book on the right is one of the regular copies available through
Amazon. The book on the left is the one
Brendan printed up for me. They’re not
identical, but they’re pretty close. It
is interesting to note that the cover on the Espresso copy has notably faded, just in the
two months since I bought it (originally there was almost no difference).
Final
thoughts...
The
Espresso Machine’s pretty damned impressive, especially when you consider this
is a first-gen machine. It’s not as
smooth, simple, and flawless as we were all led to believe, but it’s not far
off from that, either. I’d compare it,
technology-wise, to the grocery store self-check out terminals, the ones that
at first still needed a clerk standing right there to deal with the issues that
kept popping up. In just a few years,
those stations have made some leaps forward, and it’s not hard to believe the
Espresso Machine’s going to do the same thing.
If we're extremely generous with the term "remake" (counting, for example, Captain
America: The First Avenger as a remake of the low-budget 1990 film and Rise of the Planet of
the Apes as a remake of the old Conquest of the Planet of the
Apes) , 2011 had 13 remakes. Not even one in ten of the smaller
studio number (6.66%, actually). And before anyone asks, there are
overlaps between the remakes and sequels.
So, anyway, people hear about movies going into development, don't understand what that means, and assume these films are going to happen now. In film terms, going into development means... nothing.
Absolutely nothing. Dozens of remakes, reboots, sequels, and original scripts are considered for development
every day because that's how development people keep their jobs. They get nine
or ten projects "in the works" and about 95% of them fizzle out and
die. Some of them are remakes, a bigger bunch of them are original. But the
vast majority of them don't come out. This is business as usual. Disney has had
all of their sixties and seventies live movies in development as remakes or reboots for
over a decade now. We've seen one make it out-- Race To Witch Mountain. One in
over ten years.
