Book Revolution?

NPR's Morning Edition is running a story on the Fastback Book Binder from Powis Parker, Inc.. The story's teaser is that, with this new, simple, low-cost book binder, there's no reason for any book to ever go out of print again. Why? How?

This booklover's utopia would happen like this: Publishers would put their book catalogs online (probably within a subscription-only database). Bookstores would own Fastback book binders. When you want a book that's not in your library, you'd go to the bookstore. If they don't have the book on the shelf, they could go to the online catalog of books, download the one you want, and print and bind a copy for you in a matter of minutes and at a cost of a few dollars. How awesome would that be?

But even if we don't reach that point right away, how cool would it be to replace all your three-ring binders and plastic-spiral bound photo-copied packets of paper with real bound books? It could happen:

Though Parker is still interested in expanding his firm's geographic reach, these days he's also using technological breakthroughs to enter new areas—most notably the rapidly growing on-demand publishing market. Later this year, he plans to unveil a new digital machine, called Model 8, that can be used to create documents and books from a desktop environment.

The digital version of Fastback will be able to bind documents up to 350 pages in the time it takes to walk to the water cooler.

"Right now, 98 percent of these kinds of documents created in offices or homes are bound with punch holes and rings," Parker said. "That gives you a pretty good idea of the size of the market we can go after."

I believe the NPR story pegged the price of these new digital machines at only $1300/ea. Cool.

Posted January 12, 2004 05:57 AM | ai books life generally