I feel for you and can definitely see your point. But perhaps at the same time it might do for the book industry what digital distribution did for music. Basically making a huge reservoir of older music available to people who couldn't find it on the shelf before. Another plus is that I live in China –OK, Hong Kong… and getting books here is a real pain. The cost is almost 200% of MSRP because space is at a premium and basically you’re paying rent for the shop and where else are you going to go?
If Amazon were smart, they’d be on this like white on rice. They’re already having the distributors ship the books anyway so why not cut out the middle man. Make a deal with the handful of publishing companies out there for printing rights. Hookup these machines to the net and have some sort of secure connection to a database of books and send the book that’s needed on demand. Then offer customers a one time use printable bar code directly from their web page. The customer pays the same price including the shipping and handling, but goes to the mall and gets the book the same day. Because the connection is (should be) secure / encrypted / fingerprinted it should be easy to track and pay off the publishers on a per book basis especially books that are out of print or out of stock that they still hold the rights to, but don’t have enough orders to necessitate another printing.
This model would also be wonderful for bookstores. They just print one copy for customers and then print out the rest on demand.
The Cobra Tag may help you win that losing battle, acting as a Bluetooth device that attaches to your key ring and connects to your phone, it gives you the opportunity to find the missing item if it's less than 30 feet away.
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JG,
I feel for you and can definitely see your point. But perhaps at the same time it might do for the book industry what digital distribution did for music. Basically making a huge reservoir of older music available to people who couldn't find it on the shelf before. Another plus is that I live in China –OK, Hong Kong… and getting books here is a real pain. The cost is almost 200% of MSRP because space is at a premium and basically you’re paying rent for the shop and where else are you going to go?
If Amazon were smart, they’d be on this like white on rice. They’re already having the distributors ship the books anyway so why not cut out the middle man. Make a deal with the handful of publishing companies out there for printing rights. Hookup these machines to the net and have some sort of secure connection to a database of books and send the book that’s needed on demand. Then offer customers a one time use printable bar code directly from their web page. The customer pays the same price including the shipping and handling, but goes to the mall and gets the book the same day. Because the connection is (should be) secure / encrypted / fingerprinted it should be easy to track and pay off the publishers on a per book basis especially books that are out of print or out of stock that they still hold the rights to, but don’t have enough orders to necessitate another printing.
This model would also be wonderful for bookstores. They just print one copy for customers and then print out the rest on demand.