I’ve seen the future and it was in a magazine. It had to happen and now I need $50,000 real quick. Take a look at this picture. To those who remember my impressions upon seeing my first Internet jukebox a good number of years back, this is a “book ATM”. You saunter up to it, swipe your credit card and it produces a bound paperback of your choice in a few minutes. The good news is that the paperback should be priced in the $3 range.
Who hasn’t heard me complain that the final binding of pages has been the missing link in desktop publishing. You still had to send it out for that last step, negating most of the value of investing in a computer to write the book. Too many books became not worth the floor price to produce them. This is evidenced by how even a bound book of blank pages costs $6.99. You know the ones I mean.Now only a fool would buy such a machine on credit. I’ll be looking closely into the details. I hope it has a screen that you look up the book you want, and then instantly pay to have it downloaded and printed. I do not know if the reflecting panel in the background (you can see a man standing there) is part of the unit.
I am very serious about this machine. Just last week I turned away from the online ebook business because I could not get a straight price or answer out of anybody. There seems to be not one legitimate operator in the lot, the best answer you can get is “it depends”. Usually it depends on how much immediate credit you have. This machine would bankrupt those shifty operators by the score. Many of them are charging full publisher prices ($19.99) for ebooks. Another thing I know for sure, is most ebook sites on line don’t have $50,000 so they are stuck with what they are doing.
Also, small-scale publishing is the type of business that I take to instantly. I’ve looked at binding machines recently and you would still be stuck dealing with finding source material and financing minimum runs. Both are gone with this machine, I would pay the authors by the sale or tell them to get lost. Anyway, expect to hear more about this machine as I investigate. Yes, I am very aware that a published book does not alienate the senior crowd like ebooks. Wallace, give me a call.
Speaking of authors, my readership on Epinions is well up over 500 now. That means if I was a real author, I need only get just over 9,600 more readers and I’ve got myself a bestseller. That’s correct, all. As I told you years back, you only need to sell 10,000+ books to have a bestseller. Am I on my way?
Howard’s back and we waded into his picture system – he took very few pictures but did not have a sorting and filing system. Anyone else I would have charged $500 and said I told you so, but Howard traditionally catches on very fast. Except with that Panasonic camera. The instructions don’t match the buttons. Makes you wonder if Panasonic knows from experience very few people get that far.
Basically, these “mid-range” cameras ($150-$250) are not something I recommend. They are inadequate for professional work but overkill for the consumer. Sure enough, the default setting on Howard’s camera produced jpegs of 2,700KB each. What is Panasonic thinking? That is 450 times the file size of the pictures you see here, yet they are of the same visual quality. Trying to email 4 such monsters uses up the size allowment of most email providers and takes close to ten minutes.
I will say, in fairness, this Panasonic camera does have a setting called “email”. It is hard to find but it is the correct setting for jpegs intended for the Internet. Sadly, Panasonic gives no explanation on why or how, so unless you already know a lot about the topic, you won’t likely find or use the feature. This tiny concession does, mind you, leapfrog Panasonic way ahead of the pack.
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