Paperbacks - print your own in your living room

From the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco

Soon you will no longer need visit the book store - or Amazon - to buy a book: you'll be able to print one in your own home. HP, the world's largest printing company, said it intended to introduce a range of printers that would allow users to turn their home printer into a paperback production line - albeit on a small scale.

The head of the company's imaging and printing group said that having attacked the market for machines that print in the traditional fashion, HP would like to "get into glue". (Or 'finishing'. Or whatever word you use to describe how the pages of a book are stuck together. It used to be called binding.) HP already offers 'binding services' that can be used by home users - for instance that will pull together holiday photos - but the next step is to produce a homemade book that resembles what we're used to.

Comments

[J D S]

Erhem........
Are HP so out of touch they haven't heard of comb binding let alone thermal binding?
The only real problems (as HP probably know) are sheet size, collation and double sided printing.
Most UK (European) printers will handle A5 paper and this will be sold at a premium price by HP. Collation is also handled by most printers and is not an advance on present technology.
The real problem is printing on both sides of the sheet. Printing thousands of a sheet at the same time is no problem for publishers. Collation comes later. Printing different sheets pre-collated is a nightmare, one missfeed in a few hundred sheets and everything is mucked up.
Dryer ink, specialist paper and better paper handling facilities may help but I predict a very short useability for machines before (expensive?) refurb.

JDS

[MR C]

So much exciting technology, so little time to use it all.

Great stuff being able to have a
bookbinding company from your desktop. v useful

[Malcolm McLean]

Wonderful. I sell my books as PODs. If they could be downloaded and printed on the reader's machine it would eliminate shipping costs, he could have the product instantly and, most importantly, there would be almost zero risk to the publisher - the payment represents pure royalty.

[Trejkaz]

Will ordinary users be able to obtain ISBN publisher IDs? I have to wonder. There's a lot more to making a book than just printing off a bunch of pages and sticking them together with a cover.