Espresso - The Future Bookstore?

[Boston]

I got all excited this morning when I read the article headline

Is this the future bookstore?
Machine downloads books from a massive database while the customer waits

http://www.boston.com/business/techn...lf_publishing/

...and then I read the article and it's for print versions only

The Espresso also comes just as electronic book readers, like Amazon.com’s Kindle, seem on the brink of mass market acceptance. But Morrow thinks that won’t be a serious challenge to the paper products of the Espresso.

“E-books are about 1 percent of the market right now,’’ he said. “Maybe they’ll get to 10 percent in the next few years. That still leaves 90 percent of the market in paper. And print-on-demand will give independent bookstores a bigger slice of that very big pie.’’

“The Kindle is hot,’’ agreed O’Leary, “but e-books will be a small segment of the publishing industry for the foreseeable future. Print-on-demand, on the other hand, is growing. Because of digitization by Google and others, more and more books are becoming available every day. A lot of those books are going to come back to life as print-on-demand.’’

Instead of ignoring an entire market, taking it one more step which would allow you to hook up your ebook reader to file transfer seems to be the next logical step
...at least to me

[Phogg]

This sounds like massive litigation waiting to happen-

Under current business models authors can only regain control of their backstock when they go out of print. These books would likely have to cost much more than trades and not sell well- but the publisher's would claim the books were still in print.

Messy.