A California inventor has developed a book-binding machine that makes it cheap and easy to print professional-quality books within minutes. Industry analysts say the device could make it possible for consumers to purchase previously hard-to-find texts at most bookstores.

Brewster Kahle likes it.

In a few years, the term "bookstore" may refer to one of those little kiosks in the mall, where today they sell incense, neckties, cheap jewelry, and what-not. It will consist of a keyboard, a plasma display, and a small box resembling an inkjet printer.

One could envision using this flexible technology to sell 'scalable' books. If the 1,181 page version of "The Codebreakers" is too much detail for you, perhaps you'd prefer the 500 page version, or the 250 page version with a focus on pre-20th century technology.

Interested in the latest Harry Potter book? Choose anywhere from 100 to 1,000 pages in length, depending on how much time you have to spend. Buying it for the kids, and want to delete the dark parts of the story? Easy.

How about a version of the LOTR trilogy without all of the poetry and the songs? Done. Care to drop the pages-long descriptions of minutia unrelated to the plot, too? Done. Illustrated, or text only?

Music retail outlets could do this today with audio CDs; it's not clear why they don't. There is simply no good reason why you should ever walk out of Tower Records empty handed because the clerk said, "we don't have that in stock, but we could order it for you and have it here in seven to ten business days."

A good-sized Tower Records has on the order of $1 million in inventory on hand. For a million dollars, the store could buy more than a petabyte of online disk storage, on which they could store more than two million different full length albums in CD quality (not MPEG encoded), along with high quality cover art and liner notes. By comparison, online music services like iTunes and Rhapsody offer only 30,000 to 40,000 different CDs.

A California inventor has developed a book-binding machine that makes it cheap and easy to print professional-quality books within minutes.

This is a great technology that i truly hope catches on. I'm an avid reader, and one who can't stand to read anything more than a few pages long on a computer screen. I maintain that ebooks, if the correct form factor ever comes about, will be of great utility for technical books and references, in which hyperlinking and annotation capabilities are critical.

For pleasure reading, however, there's nothing better than a book. There's something really luxurious about a well made book, the texture, smell and heft, and the unabashed inefficiency of bound paper.

] Care to drop the pages-long descriptions of minutia unrelated
] to the plot, too? Done.
I have some reservations about the kinds of modifications or scalability enabled by such technology, because i think it's dangerous to encourage people to excise "undesirable" pieces of an artwork (which a novel is). Literature (art in general, really) is a passtime where the efficiency of information transmission should not be a concern...

However, i think the positive features will far outweigh the negative, allowing (eventually) cheap access to public domain works and newcomers and permitting flexibility in the edition sold (some people like the short, fat trade paperback, where i'd prefer a midsized hardback... no problem, offer multiple bindings).

Definitely something to keep an eye on...