The machine that delivers your paperback hot off the press

Blackwell, the bookseller, is installing a machine on a three-month trial at its store in London that can print out any one of about 400,000 titles within a few minutes. The innovation removes the need to order a hard-to-find novel, or the wait to buy one that has sold out. By the summer Blackwell hopes to have more than a million books in its catalogue, the equivalent of 23 miles of shelving, or 50 bookshops.

This is the first time that printing on demand has been offered to the public in a British bookshop. Blackwell's chief executive, Andrew Hutchings, is convinced that the machine could be the innovation that will help conventional bookshops to survive the onslaught from online retailers.

THE TIMES, DATE: 24/04/2009,