WATERLOO - A new print-on-demand machine at the University of Waterloo Bookstore will in mere minutes print a high-quality paperback book with colour cover at a low cost.

"The Espresso Book Machine (EBM) has revolutionized the traditional textbook supply chain for book distribution," said May Yan director of UW's retail services. "We will be able to offer options to students and faculty that will be cost effective and options for customized textbooks that will never be out of stock. Students will be the main beneficiaries, because the EBM makes it possible to distribute almost every book published, including out-of-print titles, easily and quickly at huge savings."

As well, the bookstore will offer the new service for self-publishing authors or anyone requiring a short-run print order for their own book. The EBM is designed to print one copy or up to 300 copies of a paperback book for less than the price of photocopying.

The EBM, made by a New York-based company called On Demand books, is a good example of green publishing, which deploys technology to print materials on-site and thus saves money and fuel on storage and shipping. It also avoids the pulping of unwanted books.

It has printed, bound and automatically trimmed thousands of books in sites across the world, including bookstores at University of Alberta and McMaster University.

The EBM can print out a 300-page paperback, with color cover and standard paper stock, in just four minutes. Print jobs and royalty payments to copyright holders are tracked. The on-board computer provides a simple user interface for controlling print jobs and managing content from digital files.

UW owns the latest version of the machine, which costs under $100,000 US. Waterloo's EBM version 2.0 with a high-speed printer is seven feet long, three feet wide and five feet tall, which makes it faster and smaller than previous versions.

EBM offers opportunities to work with publishers and faculty to achieve savings that will be passed on to students.

For example, the full cost of one particular McGraw Hill accounting textbook retails for $192. By selecting only the chapters of the book that students need to read, an instructor customizes the book and the price is reduced to $89, based on the number of pages printed and copyright costs.

By printing the book on the EBM, the bookstore avoids the cost of shipping and storing textbooks, as well as the delays in out-of-stock reorders.

Through On Demand Book's alliance with Lightning Source Inc, an Ingram Content Company, the EBM digital database includes more than 650,000 titles and the right to print LSI's library of titles, pending publisher approval. The EBM has access to more than one million public domain books through the Open Content Alliance and titles from other digital repositories.