is now an entirely different process. The University of Michigan is the first university to have installed theEspresso Book Machine, also termed “the ATM of books,” in one of its libraries. The wait time is about the same, but you’re ordering books now instead of Italian coffee, and the product price is a bit higher—averaging at 10 bucks a pop. But 10 bucks for a printed and bound book that is made in seven minutes is a pretty good deal, especially when you’ve got almost 2 million books to choose from. How is this possible? Or even legal?
The University of Michigan libraries have nearly 2 million books digitized for on demand printing, in addition to thousands of more books from theOpen Content Allianceand other sources. But trust me when I say that these books are all very legal; in fact, they have been out of copyright for 85 years, or more. As a result, they are in the public domain, available for anyone to print, read, and repurpose—for free. The espresso version is simply covering printing costs. Compared to the average price of books these days, especially textbooks, ten bucks is pocket change. Online sites likeLulu.comalready offer print versions of CC licensed works for cheap—remember theOER Handbook for Educators? It’s only 19.99 for 284 pages. Of course, ordering online is a bit slower than ordering from the EBM.
一旦这台机器安装好，它就可以连接到不限于密歇根大学的其他数字收藏。Props to the University of Michigan for yetagainleading the way on copyright issues.
While we’re on the topic, theOpen Content Alliancehas the similar goal of “building a digital archive of global content for universal access”. The Open Content Alliance is “a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that [helps to] build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content. [It] was conceived by the Internet Archive and Yahoo! in early 2005 as a way to offer broad, public access to a rich panorama of world culture.”
ccLearn is very excited to attend this year’s Internet Archive conference in San Francisco where an OCA meeting will take place in October. The theme for this year’s conference is “Using Digital Collections.”
Thanks toPeter SuberandThe Wired Campusfor alerting us to the EBM. You can evenwatch a videoof how the machine works.
