08.Mar.2010 One Step Closer to Star Trek

In The New York Review of Books, Jason Epstein, one of the founding partners of the company that makes the Espresso Book Machine, argues that the future of book is the Espresso Book Machine. Still, it’s full of great observations about the publishing industry and the future of books:

Digitization makes possible a world in which anyone can claim to be a publisher and anyone can call him- or herself an author. In this world the traditional filters will have melted into air and only the ultimate filter—the human inability to read what is unreadable—will remain to winnow what is worth keeping in a virtual marketplace where Keats’s nightingale shares electronic space with Aunt Mary’s haikus. That the contents of the world’s libraries will eventually be accessed practically anywhere at the click of a mouse is not an unmixed blessing. Another click might obliterate these same contents and bring civilization to an end: an overwhelming argument, if one is needed, for physical books in the digital age.