By Sheila McGrath
WKTV Contributing Writer
If you only visit Schuler Books & Music on the weekends, you might wonder about the contraption near the back of the store that looks like a copy machine on steroids.
Visit on a weekday, though, and you’re likely to catch the Espresso Book Machine in action, busily printing, binding and trimming one of the 3,000 books it produces each year.
The Espresso Book Machine can print copies of millions of old books that are out of print, and also lets authors self-publish their novels, family histories or recipe collections, according to Pierre Camy, who runs the machine at the bookstore.
When it was installed there in 2009, it was one of only 20 Espresso Book Machines in the world.
Twelve years later, the machines are still pretty rare. According to the Espresso Book Machine website, there are about 80 of them around the world, mostly at bookstores, universities and libraries. A new machine costs about $125,000, Camy said.
Authors self-publishing their works make up the majority of Camy’s customers. But more and more, the machine is being used to print copies of titles available through Google Books, a service of Google that offers millions of scanned books online.
Several universities, including the University of Michigan and Harvard University, have had their entire library collections scanned by Google Books, and so have many libraries around the world. Shoppers can search for out-of-print books to be printed on the machine at ondemandbooks.com.
As long as the book is in the public domain – meaning it is no longer under copyright – it can be printed on the machine. Most books printed before the mid-1930s are now in the public domain unless the copyright was renewed, Camy said.
“’The Great Gatsby’ is now in the public domain,” he said. “We print books from the 17th Century, the 18th Century – anything, really.”
Every now and then, Camy said, he’ll get a run of orders for a really obscure book.
He recently got several requests for ‘Camp Fires and Camp Cooking; or, Culinary Hints for the Soldier,’ an 1862 book by James M. Sanderson with recipes and cooking tips for Civil War soldiers. The book is likely being purchased by Civil War re-enactors, Camy said.
With orders coming in both from local authors and buyers around the United States, the machine is running nearly all the time on weekdays now. But that wasn’t always the case.
“The first couple years were pretty slow, but then it took off,” Camy said.
There are lots of books already in the machine’s queue as the holidays draw near, he said, but authors who want to self-publish a book before Christmas can still get it in time if the files are set up according to the required specifications. Help is available for authors who need guidance about how to create the files.
“If files are print ready, we can make it happen,” he said.
The Schuler Books & Music website has guides for the Espresso Book Machine the include different types of publishing and pricing for various packages.
