By Asher Moses
Imagine walking into a book store and knowing that even the most obscure or out of print books will always be in stock.
Angus & Robertson today became the first Australian book chain to install the Espresso Book Machine (EBM), capable of printing, trimming and binding a paperback book on demand within minutes.
It was dubbed an "ATM for books" by Time magazine, which last year named it one of the best inventions of the year.
Shoppers will initially be able to choose from several hundred out-of-print or difficult to get hold of books, but Angus & Robertson said the range would expand daily, reaching 10,000 within 18 months. They would cost the same as the current shelf price of paperbacks or less, the retailer said.
This is significantly more than the 20,000 physical books a typical Angus & Robertson shop can hold, helping the chain maintain its competitiveness in the face of significant threats from online sellers such as Amazon.
"Print-on-demand, alongside the internet, will be one of the most important developments aiding accessibility of books to the public," Angus & Robertson managing director Dave Fenlon said.
Arch-rival Dymocks said it would launch a print-on-demand system within a year but was reluctant to do so today because of the narrow range of books available for such a system.
"Print-on-demand means that you can extend the range of products in your stores by theoretically millions of books," Dymocks CEO Don Grover said.
"At this point in time the digitisation phase and the digital rights management and copyright issues that face the industry worldwide are preventing that from happening. So that's why there is a very narrow range of product that is available for print-on-demand technology."
The EBM is now up and running in Angus & Robertson's Bourke Street store in Melbourne, but the company said it would have up to 50 machines installed throughout its Australia and New Zealand network within a year.
The first book printed on the machine at the Bourke Street store was A Horse of Air by Dal Stevens, which won the Miles Franklin Award in 1970 but has been out of print for almost 20 years.
"Despite the significant investment in the machines, it will be cheaper and more efficient to print books on-demand as they're requested, rather than do short print runs, which are particularly expensive or to courier books between stores," Fenlon said.
Dymocks has already invested heavily in new technologies, last year launching an online electronic book store and a corresponding portable device on which to read the books. The store now stocks 130,000 ebooks.
But Australians aren't showing any signs of tiring of the look and feel of a traditional crisp paper book.
Grover said Dymocks had sold only about 10,000 ebooks and many hundreds of reading devices.