I Told You So

In my previous post I speculated that techonolgy would come up with a way to produce a physical book on demand. I don't claim that I was the initiator of this idea -- just that it struck me as inevitable. Well, it's here -- a machine that's been dubbed an ATM for books.  At a relatively low cost, it creates a book (from an ever-growing list of available titles) described as being of "library quality." This raises a number of questions: What effect will this have on the book publishing industry? How about libraries? And -- one of the most intriguing questions, I think -- How will literary and cultural life be affected when anyone can produce a "published" book to be marketed Amazon-like from a personal web site (or even from Amazon)?