Paige M. Gutenborg machine brings old books to new era

The Google Books project has made thousands of out-of-print and antique books readable again through the internet. Through its search-and-scan mission, Google Books has a vast collection of ancient titles available for perusal. No longer does anyone need to search through dusty library archives to find a musty book. Instead, with a few quick clicks, a PDF of the text is displayed on the computer screen. This is all digital, however, and the printing of one of these texts might well deplete any ordinary printer, but what other way is there to take the file to the physical?

Enter the Paige M. Gutenborg machine at the Harvard Book Store in Harvard Square, where it has been installed since Sept. 29 of last year. It is one of less than thirty such machines in the world, and one of only a handful of machines in independent bookstores. Many of these $75,000 to $100,000 machines are in academic libraries or university bookstores. Putting Espresso Book Machines, like these, into the hands of libraries and bookstores was the brainchild of Jason Epstein, formerly of Random House and founder of On Demand Books, the manufacturer.

The Espresso Book Machine at Harvard Book Store is tucked away in the back corner of the store but it can collect quite a crowd around it. While it works, people gather round to watch the process. First, the book choice is entered into a computer that is attached to the machine. Then a massive Xerox machine prints and shoots out page after page of smooth, cream colored paper into a tray, where rhythmic plastic prongs knock the pages together after each addition. Meanwhile, an attached Canon printer prints the title information onto a glossy white cover which slides smoothly into the bottom of the machine .

Once the printing is complete, a store employee might pause the machine to fan the pages of particularly thick books. This cools the pages and dries the ink. Next, the gleaming metal machinery clamps the pages together and rolls them over a flow of thick, yellow glue, which is kept at 350 degrees Fahrenheit. The freshly glued pages are placed onto the waiting cover, squeezed and smoothed down for a perfect bond. On the lowest level of the machine, a humming blade trims the book to the precise size of the page, ranging from a book 4 ½ inches by 4 ½ inches to 8 inches by 10 inches. The cuttings drop down into a waiting plastic bin where they are collected and offered for free to customers as scrap paper. The completed book slides like a Willy Wonka candy into a plastic chute, where the consumer picks up the still-warm book less than five minutes after the process began. Machinery magic in the local book store.

"People come from all over the world" to see the machine, store owner Jeff Mayersohn said, including librarians, teachers, students from Rwanda and others who have made the store and its machine part of their US tour. However, the Harvard Book Store is after more than just a tourist attraction. The Paige M. Gutenborg is part of "a particular mission to have any book ever written available in our store or printed in minutes," Mayersohn explained. Instead of prophesying the end of the print book as many do, Mayersohn sees the digital book as an opportunity for his store. "We can stock in store 400 million books," he said, something unimaginable a few decades ago. To him, this machine presents an opportunity to libraries too, to have their own new copies of hard-to-find works.

The Paige M. Gutenborg machine has printed four or five thousand books since her installation, including roughly a thousand last month alone, and as Mayersohn explained, has been remarkably reliable, only being down a total of two or threes days in its seven months of service. The books available to be printed on the machine are both out-of-copyright titles and current works which have been made available by an agreement with the publisher. Titles procured from the Google Books project often have a distinctive blue and white cover, whereas current titles include the normal cover art. The quality of all the books is virtually indistinguishable from a book printed and purchased the more laborious way, though the books from Google Books are vulnerable to the flaws of the scanned originals. Mayersohn and his employees try to "choose the cleanest copy," but the occasional hand written note does sneak in. The books can be ordered in the store or from the store website and picked up from the store or delivered by Metroped bicycle messengers by the next day.

Yasmine Ergas, who teaches international law at Columbia University, had a somewhat unusual request for the Paige M. Gutenborg. She came to Cambridge to visit her daughter, a student at Harvard, and to print out "The Goldstone Report," a five hundred page UN document on Palestine and Gaza. "I think it's wonderful that you can print such books," she said. "There are millions of books that need to be accessible. There are small numbers of people" interested in these books. "This is fantastic for the readers and publishers."

The variety of titles available from Paige M. Gutenborg is vast, as is the range of purposes to which to put them; from an 18th century German cookbook, to a copy of the hand written "Alice in Wonderland" given by Lewis Carroll to his niece, to Haitian-English medical guides which the Harvard Book Store shipped to Haiti during the recent natural disaster relief missions. Whatever the reason, whether academic, humanitarian, or just because, for $10 to $20 a title, anyone can buy a new copy of a piece of our cultural history.