Frankly Speaking: Expanding the Concept 
of On-Demand Books

Later, a revolving metal rack displayed a wide variety of paperbacks in a small space. The mass-market paperback pioneered book-selling in nontraditional book-selling locations such as airports, drug stores and supermarkets.

Flash forward to today. The Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Mass., is one of a growing number of retailers that has an Espresso Book Machine, which prints books on-demand. The catalog totals 3.6 million titles, mostly from Google digital files and public domain databases, along with previously out-of-print works. Few contemporary books are on the list. The system creates a library-quality, perfect-bound, acid-free, 300-page paperback book in about four minutes. It also can print your novel, cookbook, memoir, dissertation or anything else for about $100.