Impressions of the North Cascades: Essays about a Northwest Landscape

Impressions of the North Cascades: Essays about a Northwest Landscape, was out of print, resurrected by the "Espresso Book Machine!"

From Crosscut.com:
"'Espresso' books, steaming hot off the press"

They call it the Espresso Book Machine , but even the spiffy new Version 2.0 won't brew up a double latte.

It will, however, print a book for a fledgling poet or deliver an individual copy of War and Peace in less than the time it takes you to drink that latte.

Maybe it's the name, but the biggest concentration of the newest Espresso Book Machines is in the Puget Sound region, already in operation at Village Books in Bellingham and Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, and coming this month to the University of Washington Bookstore. Oscar's Art Bookstore in Vancouver, B.C., will install an EBM this year as well.

Introduced commercially in 2007 at the New York Public Library, the EBM is the brainchild of publishing executive Jason Epstein and inventor Jeff Marsh, who formed On Demand Books to market the machines, a marriage of robotic binding machinery and a commercial copier. The unit takes less space than a pair of commercial bookshelves, but has the potential of printing from a menu of millions of titles.

It's another way for independent booksellers to stay alive in a market threatened by online retailers, big-box discounters and electronic books.

Both Robert Sindelar of Third Place Books and Chuck Robinson of Village Books see three primary markets for their EBMs: 1) either public-domain (out of copyright) books or copyrighted books with very limited or specialized audiences; 2) self-published books by amateur authors or writers with specialized subjects; and 3) specialized books they can publish using their own bookstores.

Sindelar, looking for a "signature book" to launch his enterprise, is reprinting copies of Arthur Denny's 1892 book, Pioneer Days on Puget Sound, long out of print. Robinson is printing and marketing Impressions of the North Cascades: Essays about a Northwest Landscape, out of print for several years, and The Birth, Death and Resurrection of Fairhaven, a collection of reminiscences by George Hunsby from the early 20th Century.

None of these three books is readily available in bookstores, although used copies exist if they can be found. All EBM editions will be available for the cost of a standard paperback.