Teleread has an article about the Expresso Book Machine here

Everyone knows I love my kindle but before the kindle I loved books. I mean LOVE books – I still have a set of three bookshelves in my office that are overflowing and books stashed in various places around the house. Our bedroom has a set of bookshelves that frames our window (built by my creative husband) that is just for paperbacks we read for fun.

I love the idea of print on demand books and I can see it going a step further. In a generation of re-mix why not create your own book? You can already create your own reference “book” from Wikipedia. I have an article on how to do that here .

I can envision taking all the snippets and articles that I clip and bookmark around the web put together in a way that makes sense to me and plugging in my jump drive or SD card to one of these “self-print” book machines and printing out a book I can place on my shelf or carry with me to read later. You can already do this with your ereader by creating a pdf of them and then dragging the document to your kindle.

Then go a step further. Ala Carte Text books. Will we see a day when instead of just the ubiquitous copy machine that resides in school offices and teacher work rooms, a machine that allows teachers to print out copies of text books tailored to specific classes or units?

One of the sessions I attended at TCEA was on Opensource Education or just open education if you will. MIT Opencourseware is a website with over 2000 courses online and free for the self directed learner. Combine this kind of thinking with the ability to print your own text book and you see an interesting future.