amphichon

Project summary

Our goal is to develop an “ebook vending machine”; i.e., an ATM-like POS where people can select and purchase electronic texts.

Here’s how it looks to the user – they walk up to our device and swipe a credit card. If they’ve used it before, they are recognized and their account information comes up. If not, an account is initialized. Either way they next go to a browser that lets them search available books by title, author, genre, etc. Maybe they also see a list of books they have previously purchased. They select a book. Next they select delivery type – the book can be emailed to an address, made available online at a password-secured site, or transferred then and there to the user’s device via Bluetooth, wifi, or memory card. They walk away with a new book on their device.

The device would probably work best in three kinds of areas –

• Airports, or other areas where people with technology are likely to be sitting for long periods
• Bookstores, to provide a convenient way for people to buy electronic versions of books and receive them immediately
• Any high-traffic retail area (malls, etc), to provide a sales outlet for retailers like Amazon, Powell’s, Borders, etc who normally would not have any physical or local point-of-presence in that area.

Preliminary outline

• Necessary hardware
  • A small form factor PC along with a touch-screen and some hardware buttons, to be installed in a kiosk
  • Bluetooth and infrared access points for data transfer
  • Some sort of custom card-reader mechanism to allow transfer of data directly to various memory cards (MMC, SD, etc)
  • Possibly an internal mechanism to allow blank memory cards to be fed into an internal card reader to have data installed and then route the card to an external delivery point
  • A credit-card reader
• Necessary software
  • A custom POS interface to tie into the screen, hardware buttons, and other custom hardware
  • Some sort of DRM to prevent abuse of copyrighted material (god, I can’t believe I just typed that)

29 August 2005 – Initial discussion

Friend Alex and I recently were flying through Las Vegas and, outside an airport bookstore, we spotted a (non-working) book vending machine. Apparently the idea was that travelers passing through at times when the main bookstore was closed could select one of several popular paperbacks to be automatically dispensed through the machine. Both Alex and I had spent the better part of the flight there reading ebooks on our respective Palms (I think it was John Sanford on mine and Harry Potter on his) so I had ebooks on the brain already – when I saw the machine, initially I thought it was a way to purchase books electronically. Of course it wasn’t, but that got us to thinking – how hard would it be to set up a kiosk to sell books electronically? How big a market might there be for such a thing? Initial answers seemed to be “hard” and “not very big”, but still it was an interesting idea, so let’s poke at it to see what happens.

7 September 2005 – Thinking out loud

Well, it’s one of those ideas that gets more complicated as you investigate further. Not impossible technically, but there are a couple of big issues to resolve. Probably most troubling is DRM – no publisher is going to authorize the transfer of copyrighted materials electronically without a pretty solid DRM system in place, but as we all know, solid DRM is a myth. So it becomes more of a compromise between what satisfies the publishers and what’s technically feasible. Throw into the mix the fact that you’re working with potentially dozens of different publishers, some of whom have existing e-book lines using various and sundry DRM systems of their own, and the need to target several different devices and OSs (Palm, PPC, laptops, smartphones), and it becomes a Gordian knot. Rather than focus on that end of it for now, then, let’s look at what’s technically feasible and go from there. Alex suggests developing a proof of concept device with the following design specs:

• standard PC architecture running some flavor of Linux (probably Debian, knowing Alex)
• hardware card-reader interfaces for multiple card formats
• a good chunk of storage for the ebooks (200-300 Gb should suffice)
• a bunch of ebooks (I’m suggesting a Gutenberg mirror for the time being)

If we put all that together (more or less trivial) then the problem falls exclusively to software. Once the basic software is in place, we can add more complexity – the touch screen, the vending solution, etc. Once THOSE are in place, I think we’ve got a proof of concept that we can market.

Areas to research in the meantime:

• ATM technology – what’s in them? What does the software look like? How are they connected to the network? My plan would be to develop this device to the same basic form factor as your typical full-service ATM (not the tiny ones) – advantages being, you can install it anywhere you could install an ATM, using the same power and data leads. Might it be possible to get our hands on a retired ATM box and take it apart to see what’s going on inside? Will investigate.

• DRM technology (shudder) – what are current ebook sellers using? Is there an existing cross-platform solution that might work, or would we have to develop something?

7 September 2005 – Some links to review

MobileRead Networks discusses a Japanese ebook vending machine (actually, the rest of the site looks interesting as well, as far as target audience)
Looks like the same machine discussed on Engadget

5 August 2006 – In which we note with regret our lack of updates

(See above.)

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