Expresso Book Machine

[Alexires]

Read this in the paper this morning, it seems like a very interesting prospect.

If you are like me, you read books on the computer. It is rather tiring and ends up making you short sighted and rather bleary at the end of the day. I much prefer to read books in hard copy form at the end of the day, and this (http://www.ondemandbooks.com/home.htm) seems like it could help out.

A machine that reputably prints books in between 7-14 minutes each could be quite useful for the home reader. Problem is that it would cost a fair amount I would think to buy.

It takes PDF format for the books, so that is ideal for us. Might be something the RS community might want to collaborate on...

[Hinckleyforpresident]

Alexires, have you ever heard of the "Amazon Kindle"? It's amazon's ebook reading device. You either can buy books (shudder) from their store wirelessly, or you can upload books from your computer onto it. The display has a pretty good resolution and is specifically designed as to not detach your retinas.

The downside: you must convert your books into HTML to read them on a kindle.

Kindle (http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Amazons-Wireless-Reading-Device/dp/B000FI73MA)

Uploading your own books to your kindle (http://www.amazon.com/tag/kindle/forum?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum=Fx1D7SY3BVSESG&cdThread=Tx20IRDI5XIHWPZ)

[iHME]

I'd love to see these machines in bookstores and kiosks, too bad that you would have to purchase a e-book trough their system :(
No way in hell would they allow you to print pirated books, unless of course the kiosk owner was a friend of yours :)

[Alexires]

Or unless you had a machine for yourself....

Shit, I just looked at the weight of the bloody thing. It comes in at just over 2000lb (1000kg) which would put the price in the thousands of dollars.....perhaps tens of thousands.

Might be useful to cultivate a friendship with someone that has access to the machine to see if you could get copies of various books printed.

Hopefully in the near future, this idea takes off and the prices for second hand/new machines drop within the price range of the average person.


Wait out for a price on the machine, I will be enquiring soon.

[FUTI]

I looked often to a ebook reader devices since ebook web depositories started to spread through www realm. Kindle is good but any device that have limiting properties (as html only for example) or potential adware juicing trap (by books through our web site) is anoying to me. On the other side something that comes from respectable firm should be reliable device. Of the devices I looked upon there were some Chinese readers that were Linux based :-) allowing you to use number of different formats. Bad side is that price is similar to Kindle which is outside my range. Should I trust Chinese for that kind of money? Hm...that is a good question.

Any device that can flip 10000 pages before recharging a batery is good idea in my opinion. Screen on these devices are made from material like e-ink or something like that you can see on those photoframes for digital pitures. Once you "load" the picture, it doesn't change it's permanent (or in other words it doesn't use refresh rate to have "permanent" image like our computers do). Therefore picture doesn't have small oscilations that cause eye strain and it almost resemble the true paper based book. Number of shades of gray and colors is still very limiting but we can hope for the progress in the future. Anyway that is the only way to have your whole library in the backpack ;-) when you go to camping.

As for the printing books on large machines :-) I have slightly OT story. I'm the only person that actually conected university large printing machine to computer to print students midterm paper exams. They use it mainly as a photocopying machine...and that machine can be put on the fu*king grid of the faculty printing documents for the whole range of departments. I have to take my laptop to machine and connect to machine with USB cable though. My computer printer was out of toner so I couldn't print a first copy to be taken down so they can "xerox" it :-P. The machine you guys talk about is about grade or two above the machine I talk about so I wouldn't be suprised that you found one that someone use as trebuchet counterweight :-D instead of what it is built for. Friend of mine is in charge of faculty server and he "asked me" (politely treating with fists) not to mention that extraneous feature of the said machine to none. Reason? Well they will be up on his ass to devise a way how to track and count the usage of the said machine if it is put online for the purpose of charging that per project or machine that sent a printing request....and where is the money involved people tend to be unresonable and greedy and many-other-things my friend doesn't want to have bussiness with. So I can't blame him and being a friend, I do what friends do...I keep my mount shut.