Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Another version of books of the future

We are awhirl in the spin of the future of books. Will everyone switch over to digital? Will bookstores disappear from the face of the earth, to be replaced by clicking a button on your ereader and getting an instant download? The experience of browsing through a bookstore and finding buried treasure is not replicable on the internet; you don't browse amazon.com the way you browse your local bookstore any more than you browse a clothing store the way you browse an L.L. Bean catalog. Different contexts, different experiences.

Publishing giant Jason Epstein has his own opinion. "Physical books is the way [great texts] have been preserved and handed down for 5,000 years, and I think that’s not gonna end now." Epstein is behind the Espresso Book Machine, a contraption the size of a large office copier that prints books on-demand for prices starting at $8 apiece. This is not the whole future of publishing, but could it be one part?

Read the article by Ilya Marritz at Publishing Guru Bets on Book-Making Machine.

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