Maria Bonn (Director, U-M Library Scholarly Publishing Office)
This is a significant moment for book publishing and book distribution. We are essentially getting outside the limits of physical space, which has always limited, what bookstores can do and what libraries can do. But you can store an infinite number of books digitally. Then if you have the option of producing print quickly and cheaply, you can still meet people’s desire for a print book. 

So I think it's a much more democratic form of access. You don't have to be in an urban center, you don't have to be at a large academic institution to be able to get the books that you need.

So the machine makes possible access to books in a way that just simply hasn't been possible before. What it does is it allows you to print and bind a book in about five to seven minutes, and that means that you can produce for users a book that is only existing in digital form and give them their own copy, especially rarer and harder to find books, that people would have had to travel hundreds, thousands of miles to see. They can now actually purchase their own copy at a pretty inexpensive price. 

The Andaman Books is interested in working with the University of Michigan because we have a considerable digital collection. These were books that were older, often in storage, not very often used, and we saw not only great use online, which we expected; hundreds of thousands of people a month were coming to look at these books, but what we didn't expect was that people will also begin to ask us if they could get a print copy. 

Well, the beauty of the Espresso Book Machine is that all of the machines that exist can be networked, and so as they get more Espresso Book Machines out into the world, any one of those machines could print a University of Michigan book if we permitted it. So a user in another country could walk up to an Espresso Book Machine at local university and say, I want this book from the University of Michigan and have it printed and delivered right there. So this is the hope of the machine.