Vision or visionary?

This very interesting article details what I got into my head would be a business model for print-on-demand. I'm sure I read about it somewhere, that "someday" there would be a kiosk in every store and the buyer could just 'dial up' the book he wanted, go have a cup of coffee, come back and collect the book.

Then that vision morphed into doing the same with electronic books on something like an SD card or via a cable to your reading device. Then the internet got much faster than my dial-up (thank goodness!) and that vision had every good reason to go away. Plus, enter readers better than my Rocket 1100.

But I find the article out of Vermont very interesting. Need a copy of something and 1) you don't have a bookstore in your town other than Walmart, 2) the library can oblige you only by interlibrary loan which is a wonderful service, but it'll be two weeks, or 3) Amazon is currently sold out? Just download and print on the neighborhood machine.

The machine is frightfully expensive, but then the industry is watching this small store in Vermont to see how it all goes. At the moment, very well.