On Saturday,  I took a walk to Harvard Book Store to see their famous machine that bakes books on the spot. The machine, launched in September, is one of the first such printers installed in the States by its maker OnDemandBooks. The sales brochure (pdf) says a single machine can produce 60,000 books a year with little babysitting. The largest number of pages it can fit in a book is 830.

The store  lovingly calls it Gutenborg.

You can choose just about any of the two million public-domain titles scanned by Google, which means a lot of old, rare and out-of-print books.  For my test drive, I picked The Principles of Advertising, a 1920 textbook by Harry Tipper who once headed the Association of National Advertisers.

The entire process works best if you already know what you want and bring the specifics to the counter where the bookseller finds it in the Google Books database. I didn’t, and they kindly let me use their computer. I didn’t see a public terminal, but could just as well have used my smart phone.

Once you figure out what you want, the bookseller inputs your order into a Mac Mini hooked up to Gutenborg. The robot itself consists of three major parts: a big Xerox printer for the pages, a Canon printer for the cover, and a contraption that does the trimming, gluing, and binding (above).

The brochure says a 300-page book takes about four minutes to produce. The bookseller told me it would be about eight minutes.  Because  Gutenborg was experiencing some problems with printing covers, it took about half an hour.  The books themselves are printed in black and white, but the machine uses color ink for covers.

The finished 364-page book costs about $8 plus tax, which sounds even cheaper than printing the pdf of the book on a regular printer. It does feel like an absolutely regular paperback and smells of ink, although I wish the design of book covers (supplied, I was told,  by Google) were a bit more festive. A pleasant surprise — the photos and illustrations came out great.