An On-demand Book Boom?

I was listening to the radio the other morning when a short piece about on-demand book publishing caught my ear. The reporter mentioned a company called On Demand Books that was promoting its all-in-one printing/binding device, which can reportedly produce 20 bound books an hour.

The device—called the Espresso Book Machine—wasn’t exactly news to me; the company’s been talking about it for a while, and the World Bank installed one back in April. But this news report was the latest in a series of references to on-demand book publishing that have come to my attention.