Thanks for posting this!

Haste yee back

If the machines tend to jam or otherwise break down, as do commercial photocopiers, customers will be greeted with “It’s cool, but it’s out of order right now.”

And even when it does work, the books it produces will have to be cheap enough for people to buy them, as opposed to ordering them from Amazon, or buying them used online.

Lot of hype surrounding this. Why? This is a vending machine that does on a small scale what POD already does.

That being said, I’m all for it. Bring it on. The industry needs these shake-ups. But this thing reminds me of those machines I used to see along the boardwalk, the ones that made plastic dolphins while you waited.

Julia, I believe in that graph I saw here on this blog a while back.

There will still be big, big stars. There will still be a long, long tail. What there won’t be is a middle.

The job of publishers becomes to create big books and only big books, because anything else won’t be worth doing.

I have trouble understanding why this would mean the end of publishers and editors. Somebody still has to find the new manuscripts, polish them into shape, prepare the files… Even if traditional print runs ended altogether, that’s just one way of producing the finished copy. A lot goes into a book before it’s printed. So the agent who made that statement must be aware of something I’m not, or else is the type who screams “The sky is falling” at any sign of transformation.

I am definitely open to being educated if I am missing something important.