About the printing ebooks. It is possible prevent ebooks in certain formats (PDF?) from being printing. Usually the TOS of the seller or publisher gives you information about whether they allow you to print a copy for your own use. I think printing one copy for personal use ought to fall under Fair Use Doctrine myself.

Kirsten: I’ll have an order of your utopia, please.

However, I have this utopian vision of a bookstore with one “store copy” of every recently published book, for people to handle and leaf through before they decide to purchase. If you’re in a huge rush and can’t wait ten minutes for printing, just buy the store copy and they can print up a new one for the shelf. For classics and obscure titles, there could be catalogs like the ones for patterns that you find at fabric stores.

Can you imagine? No book out of print unless the publisher or author wants it to be. Authors able to make royalties on books that are now only available as battered, used copies sold for huge prices on ebay. The long tail of epublishing now available for print as well…

The Espresso Book Machines will reduce publishing and warehousing costs, eliminate the distributor (reducing costs), reduce the need for bookstore retail space and stop book returns (you print it, you keep it). All this means a lower price and easier access to 85,000 books but it will eventually impact on jobs in the printing, distribution and retail sectors when all titles become available through an EBM.

Over the years, automation in many industries has eliminated less-than-desirable jobs while new technologies create employment with much better pay, but the Espresso POD has me wondering when the ‘trickle down effect’ might begin. In a time of global financial crisis, more jobs lost will be heavily felt and also result in less money for discretionary purchases, ie books.

So, I’m left wondering if this a good time to introduce POD for customers while also feeling this is a wonderful step forward if one wishes to buy from the LS current list of ‘select publishers’.