Wednesday, August 01, 2007

It Just Got Easier to Read Old Books


The First Espresso Book Machine has been installed at the New York Public Library's Science, Industry and Business Library. What is an Espresso Book Machine? It's an ATM for books that can print and bind a book within minutes from a digital file. Any book? Well, books within the public domain. Public domain? Pretty much any book that has a copyright older than 1923. That means you can print out, for free, a copy of Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," Henry David Thoreau's "Walden," Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle," Jack London's "White Fang," Phillis Wheatley's "Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral," Louisa May Alcott's "Little Women," Henry James' "The Portrait of a Lady," and on and on and on. The titles available at the Espresso Book Machine were provided by the Open Content Alliance, "a non-profit organization with a database of over 200,000 titles."

You can read more about this machine and what it can do care of PR Web.

No comments: