POD: Just realized... I've SEEN this!

In 2000, I graduated from high school and my father retired from the military. As I went off for my freshman year, my family moved from Virginia to New Hampshire where my dad took a job with a company that was a dealer for Hunkeler printing equipment. The parent company is based in Switzerland, but yes, these machines are hunks!


During my winter break from college, I visited my family in the snowy land of New Hampshire and my dad took me to his work to see the machines he fixed and helped sell at trade shows etc. In a warehouse room full of Hunkeler machines, I saw one similar to this:

Copyright 2011 www.hunkeler.ch

It was in a line with tons of other machines similar to it. My dad pressed a button and it sparked to life, shooting copies of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice into a bin. My sister and I each got a souvenir copy. Then he said, "Lizard, watch this." A few more buttons on the control panel, the machine finished the Austen copies in progress, then adjusted and started printing copy's of Dickens' A Christmas Carol and putting them into a different bin. There was plexi glass over many of the "open" areas, and it was so neat to see a book be made, kinda like the voyeurism afforded to stuff animals by the Build-A-Bear kiosks in the mall. I still remember looking at the amber glop of ooze that was churned by a red hot paddle. That was the glue kept hot to glide on rollers as the books zoomed across before pinched with a cover. Another machine stitched hardbacks together.

Check out hunkeler.ch to see what the machinery of POD looks like. It's nothing sinister. In fact, from what I saw back in 2000, it was efficient and impressively smart. Now, imagine a book store where you picked the book you want, even one that is "out of print" and a machine in the back room whirrs to life and in five minutes (it has to cool), you have your very own copy. I hope that reality comes true, because it will be a very great boon to all of society.

Just saw they have a video of basically what I witnessed over ten years ago. And back then, I had no aspirations to be a writer. I just wanted Dad to finish up so we could hit the mall.... :)
http://www.hunkeler.ch/bookblock_solution_media-pkat-3259-skin-hunkeler.html

"CANCELLED" arriving SEPTEMBER 2011. A robotics engineer asks his business partner to marry him, but a previous one-night stand is having his baby.