Espresso Book Machine at Village Books in Portland, Oregon; photo by Lindsey Otta

As Richard Nash writes on his recent blog post” The Emergent Landscape, or, The Continuous Permanent Reinvention of Publishing”: “transformation is irrevocable, continuous, multivalent, and potentially asymmetric.” One of the latest reinventions to emerge is the Espresso Book Machine, On Demand Books’s digital photocopier, book trimmer and binder, and desktop computer that can produce a trade paperback book in five to ten minutes. Books currently listed in the EspressNet software include titles from LightingSource, Ingram’s print-on-demand division, and public domain titles from Google Books. Those out-of-print and backlisted titles are now readily available. Matt Briggs points out in his Reading Local Seattle article that for writers, “an author merely needs to have their book listed in EspressNet, which costs less than having galleys printed and much less than an entire print run.” And for readers this means that along with ebooks, print-on-demand machines produce “the same cornucopia for literature that the music world has already been enjoying.”