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Amazon, far from an evil behemoth, gives customers what they want: low prices, unlimited choices, and easy shopping from home. Unlike Wal-Mart, which often peddles low-quality products, Amazon sells both the good and the bad, the passing fad and the classic. Try finding a rare book by a Senegalese writer, and you’ll be relieved by Amazon’s deep reach into even the most obscure corners of publishing. So what does that leave to the independents?

Their strong points have always been personal service, informed recommendations, browsing of real books . . . But now, emerging on the fringes of the book world, might be a new weapon for independents, as well as bookstore chains, in their battle with Amazon.

Meet the Espresso Book Machine.

Browse a screen for book titles, read a few pages of a book, and click. The machine will print out a copy of the book in front of your eyes. You think Amazon’s two-day delivery is great? Try instant gratification.

Although not all books are available on it, more will be coming soon. Here is a video about Angus & Robertson of Australia, the first retail chain in the world to adopt the Espresso Book Machine.

In Manchester Center, Vermont, the Northshire Bookstore recently became the first independent bookstore in the United States to have an Espresso Book Machine.

Imagine the independent bookstore of the future. Walk in and browse through shelves of real books. Talk with sellers who know publishing and can suggest titles you would never have found on your own. Still can’t find a physical book to buy? Step up to the Espresso Book Machine, view virtually every book known to humankind, and click.

Amazon, now seemingly unstoppable, is dependent upon an antiquated and environmentally questionable distribution system: trucking books to warehouses, sending packages through the mail. In a world connected by wires and wirelessly, it’s hard to see how that system will survive capitalism’s unforgiving drive toward lower costs.

In the scramble to reinvent bookselling, video advertising is emerging as an industry unto itself. A New York Times essay from January explains that it all began in 2002 when an aspiring romance novelist named Sheila English founded Circle of Seven (COS) Productions, a social media marketing service for books, authors, and publishers. The company—which has trademarked the terms “Book Trailer” and “Book Teaser”—specializes in “creat[ing] an atmosphere that says ‘Books are entertainment.’”

COS has experienced exponential growth since 2006 (12 projects that year, according to the Times; 140 in 2008).  Their services are tailored to a wide range of budgets, from the bargain basement “Cover Story” (the only image is your book cover) for $300, to the “Platinum Teaser” (special titling, effects, photoshop scenes) for $2,500.  (To shoot an author interview, or a full blown trailer with a script and live actors, call for a quote.)  For a taste of the drama and intrigue that COS can create in a 36-second “Level 2 Mini Teaser” ($1,500), check out what they’ve done with Baited (2006), a romance novel by Crystal Green.  (Or for a more literary interpretation of the book video, see what Harper Collins did for Rivka Galchen’s critically acclaimed Atmospheric Disturbances [2008].)

Meanwhile, many authors on shoestring budgets are embracing the guerrilla marketing spirit, posting homemade book videos on YouTube, MySpace, their own websites, and elsewhere online. 

And why not bookstores? Green Apple Books of San Francisco, one of the best-loved independents in the Bay Area, is creating an atmosphere all its own with videos to promote its Book-of-the-Month recommendations. Created “in the lo-fi style” by SF-based French Press Films, these videos feature scruffy-looking but enthusiastic staff members hamming it up in testimonials, “dramatizations,” and “reenactments” related to the featured book. Can videos like these drive foot traffic to Green Apple or increase sales?  Green Apple Commercial #1:  Book of the Month!  (in which staff bolster their endorsement of David Benioff’s City of Thieves with a money-back guarantee) has been viewed nearly 1,200 times since it was posted in June 2008—although the only comment it has inspired (or provoked) is “dorks!”  Still, the videos have some infectious appeal, and they’re getting more sophisticated.  Their latest effort, Green Apple Commercial #7:  Conquest of the Useless!, shot “on location” with bookseller Stephen Sparks doing his best Werner Herzog,  is my favorite:

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