Now that it’s starting to seem like, well, out-of-date technology, the in-house printing contraption most people know as the Espresso is catching on like wildfire with two long-time players in the American market who have been feeling left behind for a while now: indie booksellers and a little company known as Xerox. First the latter, as Judith Rosen reports in a Publishers Weekly story:

Xerox and On Demand Books, maker of the Espresso Book Machine, have teamed up to jointly market and sell the EBM with the Xerox 4112â„¢ Copier/Printer worldwide. Under the new agreement, the 21 stores and libraries that already use the EBM will not be required to switch to the 4112, although as On Demand CEO Dane Neller points out, it is faster than the Quasar printer. The 4112 prints 110 pages per minute and can produce a 300-page book in less than four minutes.

And Third Place Books — one of the leading indie bookstores in the Seattle area — has wasted no time getting one, according to a Seattle Times report by Gabriel Campanario, who includes a sketch of the machine with his story (see above). “We feel we’re been threatened by the likes of Amazon. Now we have the option of being a bookstore, a publisher or a printer,” says Vladimir Verano, who calls himself the “lead publisher” of Third Place Press, “the bookstore’s new publishing label.”

Campanario further explains that “The EBM prints pages, glues them, binds them and produces a high-quality paperback.” But not always: Verano couldn’t get the machine to work right for Campanario and the reporter eventually had to go home without seeing it make a book.