Blackwell's unveils Espresso Book Machine - any title printed while you wait

It's not elegant: it looks like a large photocopier. But the Espresso Book Machine could herald the biggest change for the literary world since Gutenberg invented his printing press more than 500 years ago.

Unveiled today at Blackwell's Charing Cross Road branch, in central London, the machine prints and binds books in five minutes.

Blackwell believes the introduction signals the end to the frustration of being told a title is out of print or not in stock. The Espresso offers access to almost half a million books, from a facsimile of Lewis Carroll's original manuscript for Alice in Wonderland to Mrs Beeton's Book of Needlework.

The company hopes to increase the catalogue to more than a million titles by the end of the summer, the equivalent of 23.6 miles of shelf space or more than 50 bookshops rolled into one. The majority of these books are out of copyright, but Blackwell is working with UK publishers to increase access to in-copyright writing. So far the response has been overwhelmingly positive, the firm says.

"This could change bookselling fundamentally," said Blackwell's chief executive, Andrew Hutchings. "It's giving the chance for smaller locations, independent booksellers, to have the opportunity to truly compete with big stock-holding shops and Amazon ... I like to think of it as the revitalisation of the local bookshop industry. If you could walk into a local bookshop and have access to one million titles, that's pretty compelling."

The Espresso can cater to a wide range of needs from serving academics keen to purchase reproductions of rare manuscripts to wannabe novelists needing a copy of their self-published novels, says Blackwell, which will be monitoring its use to decide pricing and demand. The plan is to roll out the innovation across the 60-store network, with the flagship Oxford branch likely to be an early recipient as well as campus-based shops.

The Espresso is the brainchild of the American publisher Jason Epstein and was a Time magazine invention of the year. It proved a star attraction at the London Book Fair this week, where it printed more than 100 pages a minute, clamping them into place, then binding, guillotining and spitting out the (warm as toast) finished article.

Described as an "ATM for books" by its US proprietor On Demand Books, the Espresso machine has been established in the US, Canada and Australia, and in the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, Egypt.

The Charing Cross Road machine is the first to be set up in a UK bookstore. It cost Blackwell about £120,000, but Phill Jamieson, head of marketing, said: "It has the potential to be the biggest change since Gutenberg."

Taken from The Guardian and thanks for pointing this article out: David Colpitts at david@digitaljoy.ca