A California inventor has developed a book-binding machine that makes it cheap and easy to print professional-quality books within minutes. This is a great technology that i truly hope catches on. I'm an avid reader, and one who can't stand to read anything more than a few pages long on a computer screen. I maintain that ebooks, if the correct form factor ever comes about, will be of great utility for technical books and references, in which hyperlinking and annotation capabilities are critical. For pleasure reading, however, there's nothing better than a book. There's something really luxurious about a well made book, the texture, smell and heft, and the unabashed inefficiency of bound paper. ] Care to drop the pages-long descriptions of minutia unrelated
] to the plot, too? Done.
I have some reservations about the kinds of modifications or scalability enabled by such technology, because i think it's dangerous to encourage people to excise "undesirable" pieces of an artwork (which a novel is). Literature (art in general, really) is a passtime where the efficiency of information transmission should not be a concern... However, i think the positive features will far outweigh the negative, allowing (eventually) cheap access to public domain works and newcomers and permitting flexibility in the edition sold (some people like the short, fat trade paperback, where i'd prefer a midsized hardback... no problem, offer multiple bindings). Definitely something to keep an eye on... Book-Binding Technique Could Revive Rare Texts | 
