United Liberty

While spending the holiday season in my hometown of Seattle, I came across an article about an independent bookstore that is outmaneuvering the larger competition:

Verano pushes a few buttons and the device sets to work. First, the cover is printed, and then the Kyocera starts spitting the pages of the book inside the transparent chamber. Once the interiors have been printed, a glue pot, which has been heating up and churning to life as the pages have printed, lines the inside spine of the cover with a viscous brown glue, and the pages get pressed into place. A whirring saw-blade arm sizes the book down, and the whole thing is dumped—ker-CHUNK—into a vending slot on the side of the machine. Besides the generic cover (just the title, author’s name, and the name of the bookstore, in aqua blue), the finished copy of the book is virtually indistinguishable from any other paperback in the bookstore. It’s still warm, and it smells of ink. Total time, from inception to completion: 15 minutes. Like all the other public-domain Google Books, the cover price is $8. The store is working on creating a widget for its website in the next few weeks that will enable customers to browse and order books. There will also be a dedicated computer for that purpose available to customers in the bookstore.

Printing out-of-print books is pretty neat, and so is the fact that the bookstore now has almost-immediate access to 800,000 contemporary print-on-demand titles (likeThe Tooth Fairy and A Frolic of His Own) that would normally take four to six weeks for a brick-and-mortar bookstore to acquire (the EBM exponentially increases Third Place’s stock from 200,000 titles to millions), but it’s not the device’s major selling point.

Third Place Books has begun publishing its own line of books under the Third Place Press shingle. Verano, a freelance graphic designer, lays out the books for publication and designs the covers. The flagship TPP title, Pioneer Days on Puget Sound by Arthur A. Denny ($10), is a richly illustrated journal of the earliest days of Seattle by one of its founding fathers. The book has been in and out of print for a century, and now, thanks to the Espresso Book Machine—and perhaps for the first time in the history of independent bookselling—Third Place Books can always get a physical copy of the book to customers faster and more cheaply than Amazon .com, where the lowest-priced used copy at the time of this writing sells for $18.45, not including shipping.

Like all innovative technology, the espresso book machine seems like an obvious no-brainer. There is an entire text section of websites like Archive.org and the ability to have a personal physical copy of an out of print book in your hands gets rid of the wait involved in ordering an overpriced rare copy or waiting for a publishing house to pick it up.

Third Place Book’s brilliant ingenuity also came about bailout free. Third Place Books is one of the first stories in a long time of independent shops providing a tangible good or service that bigger corporate monoliths cannot, and all without the help of the Obama or Bush administration.  There’s nothing like individual initiative and entrepreneurship.