A couple of weeks ago I got the chance to show you guys the proof copy of the Lamjung Yolmo dictionary I’ve been working on. Yesterday was printing day, and one of the nicest things about getting a book printed at a custom book printer is that you actually get to see the book being made and hold a freshly printed copy, literally hot off the press.

The technological wizardry that makes all this magic happen is the Espresso Book Machine at the Custom Book Centre at the University of Melbourne. It’s like something out of a movie about crazy machines:

The pages are printed off an industrial photocopier on the left, and the cover comes in from the right. There’s a neat video if you want to see it all in action. This is my very blurry image of the pages being set into the cover with hot glue:

It then gets guillotined into the correct size using a giant moving blade, and magically pops out at the end like a packet of chips from a vending machine:

The great thing about a custom press is that I get to distribute something that I would never have had the time or capital to do through a traditional printing press. The turn around with a traditional press would have been much longer. More importantly, it cost less than $500 to do a run of 40 copies, and I retain all of the intellectual property rights and copyrights to the book (which I’ve creative commons licensed). The capital came from a grant for small languages, which has been great. Any future profit from sales of the book can go into making more copies for the community.

Overall it’s been a cost effective way to share my data with the wider community, and with the speakers of Lamjung Yolmo I work with. The book has also been made in partnership with the World Oral Literature Project [ http://www.oralliterature.org/ ] - I’ll talk about that aspect of the project when we put the digital copy on their website in the next week or so. For now, you can appreciate the giant stack of strikingly green dictionaries now sitting in the office.