You
pause at the front door of the eco-house that you and your partner designed in
Vancouver’s Point Grey and pull up the collar of your jacket. The air is fresh
with the promise of snow and you smile with thoughts of spring skiing at
Whistler.
You
glance at the time display on your Smart Glasses. You’ve decided to forego the WaveGate and walk to the café; you have plenty of time to walk through the hilly forested streets, with a view of English Bay. You want to check out the refurbished solar-house on Locarno Crescent that your company helped design. Based on a living model of Biomimicry, the
house is the latest iteration of your company’s “symbiosis” model of 100%
sustainability, in which people live in a cooperative and synergistic partnership with
their environment. The house is an intelligent organic facility with
self-cleaning floors and walls; heated, fuelled and lit by organisms in a
commensal relationship. Everything works on a natural cycle of harmonious
renewal and natural evolution. You smile, rather self-pleased. It has taken you
a few years to convince the city council to accept this new model in community
design. Now, it’s happening everywhere.
It’s
April 12, 2074. A special day. And a special year. The year of the wooden horse
in the Chinese calendar. Also called the green
horse, it’s associated with spring, growth and vitality. The horse symbolizes nobility, class, speed
and perseverance. Horse energy is pure unbridled spirit. Playful, wild and
independent, the horse has a refined instinct that flows through action and
movement. Together, these symbols promise both chaos and great opportunity. And
transformation.
The year of the wooden horse only occurs every sixty years. And sixty years ago
today your mom turned sixty. You release a boyish grin at what you intend to do
in celebration. On that day, sixty years ago, she celebrated her sixtieth
birthday with the release of Natural Selection, her collection of speculative short stories about human
evolution, AI, genetic manipulation, transhumanism, and the human-‘machine’
interface. She also celebrated the local printing of Metaverse, the third book of her space detective trilogy, The Splintered Universe. It was the
second book to be printed by Toronto Public Library’s newly acquired Espresso
Book Machine; one of only two EBMs in Toronto at the time.
A smile
slants across your face as you remember what libraries and bookstores used to
look like then. Both were struggling with a changing paradigm of reading,
writing and publishing. Many of the older folk feared that books—print books,
particularly—were going extinct as more exciting channels of communication like
videos, interactive games and instant social networking took over. Of course,
that didn’t happen. “Story” and “storytelling” were simply evolving and the
paradigm shift simply embraced a new model that incorporated more diverse expression.
You remember conversations with your mom about Chapters-Indigo, whose face
changed from a bookstore to a gift store and tchotchke filled more and more of the storefront. As large
bookstores struggled to dominate, the EBM—like its lithe mammal cousins in the
Cenozoic Era—created a new niche for itself: the book ATM.
The
size of a Smart Car, the EBM could fit nicely in a stylish café, housing and
dispensing—Tardis-style—many more books than its diminutive size. In 2014, the
EBM carried over eight million titles, including commercial books and out-of
print gems. That number has tripled as virtually every publisher has embraced the
Book ATM model to sell books.
You inhale
the tantalizing aroma of freshly ground and brewed coffee before you reach
Zardoz Café. The retro-style café is a converted Edwardian-style house with
high arched windows and a living roof overlooked by tall sycamore trees. You
climb the stairs and enter the café. Its 2020’s style interior that your
company helped design is decorated in earthy tones, avant-garde art, a forest
of dracaenas and ferns and a stepped creek, complete with goldfish and crayfish.
A shiny brass Elektra Belle Epoque espresso maker sits at the bar, dispensing the finest fair trade coffee.
Your
sweeping gaze notes several people at the small round tables, enjoying good
coffee and conversation; your special guest hasn’t arrived yet. You spot the
WaveGate at the back, resembling an old English police box. Next to it sits the
EBM. Eager to do your deed before your
guest arrives, you sidle to the coffee bar and catch Grace’s eye. She smiles;
you’re a regular. You touch her wrist with your watch and the data passes onto
her embedded interface. She taps her hand to process the book order—she insists
that you not pay—then she makes your double-shot espresso—the old-fashioned way.
As she grinds and taps and runs the
machine, you and she chat about skiing this spring. Just as Grace hands you a perfect
crema-topped espresso, the WaveGate shimmers briefly and then its doors open like an accordian.
Your
mom emerges from the “tardis”, smartly dressed in an early-century blazer and
skirt, and grinning like an urchin. She resembles the seventeenth Doctor a bit,
you decide—the first female Doctor Who, finally! Somehow—you don’t know how she
does it—her old-fashioned style manages to embrace “retro-cool”. She’s arrived
from Switzerland, where she is house and cat-sitting for good friends in
Gruyeres. From there she still commutes—Tardis-style—as sessional lecturer at
the University of Toronto, where she maintains a tiny book-festooned office.
 |
| Kevin Klassen |
“Kevy!”
she squeals like a girl, obviously happy to see you. You don’t cringe; you’ve grown
accustomed to the ripples of interest your mom’s unalloyed enthusiasm usually
creates.
“Happy
birthday, Mom!” You seize her in a hug. “I’m glad you made it to Vancouver for your 120th
birthday.” Traveling the WaveGate suits her, you consider.
“I
like the tardis better than you, I
think,” she says, smiling sideways at you with knowing. She’s right; you prefer
the old-fashioned way of traveling, without having to reconfigure your
molecules from one place to another. In fact, you prefer the old-fashioned way
of doing a lot of things, you decide with an inner smile.
“I
have a surprise for you, Mom,” you say with a knowing grin. Your mom likes
surprises. Her eyes light up and she beams at you. You glance at Grace with a
conspiratorial look. She takes the cue and starts the EBM.
“Over
here,” you say, steering your mom toward the EBM, already humming like an old
tomcat getting its chin scratched. Your mom bends down to watch the pages spew
out of the paper holder and stack neatly in a tray, then get snatched by
robotic fingers as a colour cover is created then laid below, ready to envelope
the book interior. After the gluing and binding, the robots trim the book on
three sides then summarily send it sliding out a chute on the side.
Your
mom has guessed what the book is; but she still squeals with glee when she sees
it. It’s Metaverse, of course; the
book she first had printed on the EBM in Toronto’s Public Library sixty years
ago on her birthday.
 |
| Nina Munteanu proud with Metaverse just printed on EBM |
“I
just thought you’d like another book,” you say with a laugh. Like she needs
another book. But this one’s special; it’s sixty years old today. Just like she
was, sixty years ago—today. You pull out your PAL and point at your mom, as she
seizes the perfectly bound book. “Let me take your picture!”
She poses with the book, looking like a kid with candy. You check the image and
laugh. “There it is. You don’t look a year over sixty!” You grin at your
120-year old mother.
“And
you don’t look a day over twenty-three!” she teases back.
You give her a
slanted smile. You’re eighty-three.
 |
| Lisa Naccarato & Nina Munteanu in 2014 |
Beaming, she goes on, “I remember doing
this exact thing sixty years ago in Toronto! Those same feelings of
overwhelming gratitude and wonder are still there,” she confides. “I remember
telling the CBC reporter who covered the EBM launch that it felt like a birthing.” She throws me a crooked grin. “Only the labour was on the computer
instead of in the hospital!”
Visibly
pleased and touched, she snatches me in a bear hug.
“This
is the best present a mom could get from her son. Thanks for remembering. It’s been
an incredible ride and it’s all been worth it.”
“Join
me for a coffee; then I have a house to show you…” you say, smiling with pride.
The Espresso Book Machine
 |
| The EBM at the Toronto Reference Library |
Many
bookstores, libraries, and universities around the world are hosting the
Espresso Book Machine® (EBM) by On Demand Books LLC (and associated with
Lightning-Ingram). The EBM makes millions of titles available via the EspressNet®
software and produces quality paperbacks in minutes at point of sale. The EBM
is not a print-on-demand solution, but a powerful new digital-to-print channel
that eliminates lost sales due to out-of-stock inventory or the hassle of
returns.
Advantages:
- Readers: millions of books, multiple languages, made on demand for you.
- Bookstores, Libraries and other Retailers: sell (or lend) more titles without the extra inventory; capture the growing self-publishing market.
- Publishers: the EBM offers an additional sales channel and greater visibility to a publisher’s titles. It also avoids out-of-stocks and eliminates returns.
- Authors: earn additional income otherwise lost through the used-book market.
Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist and
internationally published novelist of science fiction and fantasy. In
addition to eight published novels, Nina has written award-nominated short
stories, articles and non-fiction books, which have been translated into
several languages throughout the world. She currently teaches writing at The
University of Toronto and George Brown College.
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