Reading the future: Part 1 of 2

In the past year I've read a number of articles about the Espresso Book Machine. The item is essentially a vending machine that offers a selection of hundreds of thousands of popular books. It's able to perform this amazing feat by printing and binding the book as you purchase it. By printing on demand, the Espresso doesn't need to be a gigantic machine full of moldering stock no one wants. At the end of the day a worker can simply reload the machine with ink and paper, check to see what titles are selling well or poorly, and be done with it. It's a task more akin to putting toner in a xerox than stocking a bookshelf.

Unfortunately, while the Espresso performs this amazing feat quickly, all told, it does so rather poorly. The end product is wholly black and white and lacks cover art. But at least the books are cheap… right? Well, not exactly. The price for one of these instant pulps is around $43.00 (American). The Dean Koontz paperback you might drop into your beach bag probably set you back 8-10 bucks, and it had cover art.

But this article is not meant to condemn the drolly named Espresso; instead my intention is to peer into the future and see what impact this device might have in our culture. And, if people are paying attention to this technology and thinking along the same lines I am, the Espresso –or machines of its ilk– could metamorphose the consumer media landscape.

The first place I heard talk of the Espresso was from comic author Warren Ellis (Transmetropolitan, Planetary, X-men). He theorized that in the future, people would own devices like the Espresso in their homes, printing and binding books for personal use the same way you run off emails from Grandma or photos from vacations. He goes so far as to reference a thing called Papernet; a sort of hard-copy Napster where authors and consumers trade book files and then create hard copies in their home offices. File > Print > Literature.

Papernet is a lovely idea, but it's also oddly anachronistic. The baroque notion of utilizing bleeding-edge technology to do the work of an ancient form is quaint in its improbability. It would better fit in a steampunk setting than in our real world; it's a throwback to a combination of zeitgeist and technology that never was and never could have been. Ultimately people want one solution or the other: either print or screen reading.

Debating whether or not one reading format will come to dominate the other is futile. I consider myself a futurist, but by no means do I think print is on its way out--but neither are the new organs of reading. It's obvious to all that digital content has toppled more than a few big-name newspapers. This doesn't mean, however, that you should believe any street-corner doomsayer proclaiming that by the end of this (or any) year you'll no longer be able to hear the crinkle of the sports section as you leaf through the morning gazette.

In that big ladder-wrapped New York Times building scraping the sky of 42nd Street, there's an entire floor devoted to research and development. The news giant is thinking about and pouring dollars into new methods of news delivery. David Byrne had a great article about his tour of the facility. Making considerations for existing media devices and thinking about new ones (foldable screens!) is a big step in the right direction.

Eventually the Espresso (and surely some copycat technologies) will find its legs and even its keel, but for now a fifty-dollar book just isn't a supportable model. What is? What can we expect this technology to mean for the the publishing market in years to come? Next week in Part 2 of this article we'll discuss all of that. Stay tuned.