From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2014 14:20:11 +0000

>Personally my online versus physical buying habits are now more to do
>with being able to get a physical product immediately instead of
>waiting even 24 hours rather than strictly price.  Convenience book
>store on every corner anyone?

This is the (as yet unrealized) promise of retail print-on-demand
technologies such as the Espresso Book Machine. It will take two changes
for that promise to be realized, one business/cultural and one
data/technological: first, publishers will need to decide that they¹re
okay with making their frontlist content available on a storefront POD
basis; second, the companies that manage networked collections of ebook
content will have to figure out a scalable and sustainable way to make
that content quickly and intuitively findable by customers.

Both of these strike me as attainable goals, but they haven¹t been
accomplished yet.

Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dean for Scholarly Resources & Collections
Marriott Library, University of Utah
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