Google Lets You Custom-Print Millions of Public Domain Books

“Over the last seven years, Google has scanned millions of dusty
tomes from deep in the stacks of the nation’s leading
university libraries and turned them into searchable documents
available anywhere in the world through its search box.

“And now Google Book Search, in partnership with On Demand
Books, is letting readers turn those digital copies back into paper
copies, individually printed by bookstores around the world.

“Or at least by those booksellers that have ordered its $100,000
Espresso Book Machine, which cranks out a 300 page gray-scale book
with a color cover in about 4 minutes, at a cost to the bookstore
of about $3 for materials. The machine prints the pages, binds them
together perfectly, and then cuts the book to size and then dumps a
book out, literally hot off the press, with a satisfying clunk.
(The company says a machine can print about 60,000 books a
year.)”

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