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IMAGINE walking into a bookshop and being certain that even themost obscure title will always be in stock.In October, the first British store will install a device calledthe Espresso Book Machine, nicknamed the ATM for books. Shopperswill be given a choice of more than 1m books - many rare ordiscontinued - to download and print in shops to take home asready-bound paperbacks.Some publishers are making plans to digitise their entire catalogueof titles, in or out of print. This will mean they can be printedeither through the machines or on demand by the publisher.The Espresso Book Machine’s backers claim it combines thevirtually unlimited choice of the internet with the packaging of aconventional book. It also has the potential to make even the mostobscure titles easy to buy.Many shoppers complain that bookstores are overwhelmed by piles ofheavily hyped books from big publishers, while more unusual titlesbecome harder to find. “Books are here to stay and this is a great invention whichwill give more choice to readers,” said Vince Gunn, chiefexecutive of Blackwell, the book chain with more than 60 shops inthe UK.Initial signs from America, where a handful of on-demand machineshave been installed, suggest they will also help democratisepublishing by opening it to writers and poets who do not have thebacking of a multinational publisher.The machines are able to design and print books of reasonablequality in runs of 50 for as little as £200.Blackwell will install its first Espresso machines, leased fromtheir American maker, OnDemandBooks, at a handful of stores thisautumn.

The machines are 9ft long, 5ft high, and allow customers to type inthe title they want to buy. After about seven minutes, the book isprinted out, trimmed and bound, selling for the same price as itsshelf equivalent at the shop.Blackwell says the binding, using glue heated to 150C inside themachine, is of comparable quality to that of conventional books.The finished product is much like a conventional paperback,although critics say illustrations are of poor quality and thebooks have a “rubbery” feel.Other chains are not yet committing themselves to the technology,and will wait to see whether it proves popular and if the machinesbecome smaller.As many as 1m titles may soon be available through on-demandprinting, including 600,000 titles being digitised by the publisherLightning Source, available to be printed in one-off versions onthe Espresso machine, as well as hundreds of thousands of“open-source” titles, such as classics with expiredcopyright.Other approaches to on-demand publishing are also being tested.Faber & Faber, best known for its literary authors includingAlan Bennett, TS Eliot and Ted Hughes, has just set up Faber Finds,designed to revive out-of–print books by making themavailable in small runs of as few as 50.The first authors whose works will be available include JacobBronowski, FR Leavis, Angus Wilson, PH Newby and the poet LouisMacNeice.PFD, a literary agency, is teaming up with Microsoft to offer smallprint runs of books by its authors, including VS Pritchett, StormJameson, Frances Donaldson and Angela Huth. They will be soldthrough its own website, as well as Amazon and other onlineretailers.Early victims of on-demand books could include second-hand dealers,who control much of the market in out-of-print and obscure works.Richard Booth a dealer and self-proclaimed “king ofbooks” in Hay-on-Wye on the Welsh border, said:“I’m not worried as they will never get everything onthe internet.”The changes affecting book publishing could be similar to thosethat have happened in the music industry, which is releasing moreand more new work over the internet and increasingly making entireback catalogues available for downloading.

While big publishers are trying to take advantage of printing ondemand for their established authors, the book machines are alreadygiving new chances to undiscovered amateur authors where they arein use in America.Chris Morrow, who has installed a machine at his Northshirebookstore in Manchester Center, Vermont, said: “People aretending to buy the obscure books . . . I’ve had people comingin to ask for Tom Sawyer in French, which we could do, a book onthe Huguenots and a lot of history.”He added: “Mostly, though, the machine is used forself-publishing by all stripes of authors. “It costs $75 \ for the set-up fee then seven cents a page.Usually they print off 20-50 books for a total cost of $400-500. “We have a line outside and we are printing steadily,everything from memoirs to college reunions and geology. One womaneven wrote a book about two dogs and a pigeon who talk to eachother.”