In my last year of working for Big Printing and Shipping Co* I working in a high volume center that printed large orders for the retail stores. One of the main recurring jobs we got was printing, gluing, and cutting paper back books, often between 100 and 10,000 at a time.

I hated it.

There was a lot of labor involved, and when you sit and think about it, the environmental aspects of all that paper being shipped about (Let alone how long those book were actually going to be used before they went into hopefully the recycling), not to mention the waste aspect (a good number of books failed quality assurance for one reason or another), is just horrifying.

It’s one of the reasons I’m really into PDF documents for most things, and think the Kindle is really snazzy.

But, for those that love the dead tree medium, I really like the idea of the Espresso Book Machine from On Demand Books, LLC.

It’s a pretty sexy robot, and takes a big chunk out of the problems with the printing model I described above.

Instead of having a bunch of paper shipped to a printer, and then a bunch of books shipped out, you can ship a bunch of paper straight to where the books are being distributed from (a book store for example) and have books be created as needed. AWESOME.

Also, talk about an easy way to improve selection in small book shops. (Or for that matter, talk about a sweet way to make a book store in a mall kiosk…)

Anyway, I just think this is a really cool robot. (That had I not already left Big Printing and Shipping Co* would be a threat.)

[via Make]

*fictionalized name, just to be safe.