Self Publishing Machine

Wednesday: (07/11) Ernie and I started early moving some rock in the cool of the morning. We started a bit after 7am in violation of the no work until after 8am in Palo Alto, but rules are meant to be broken and we were pretty quite anyway. We were quite, that is until I started using the tamper after 8am. We stopped by 11am. Breakfast was more green slim, I mean green smoothies. Actually very good. Lunch was Chinese chicken salads. Dawn and I headed off toward Gilroy after lunch. I needed to get a replacement Fantastic vent fan for the motorhome so we stopped at Camping World in San Martin just North of Gilroy. We then continued on to our primary destination, Santa Cruz. Traffic was terrible on the freeway so we exited to surface roads only to be hung up in more construction. Seems like a plot? Dawn wanted to attend a meeting at the Bookshop Santa Cruz about self publishing. The book store has a fancy new Espresso book publishing machine, one of only 80 in exstance and of only 12 in retail shops. Their machine is one of only two on the west coast, the other being at Powell's in Portland. The machine can print, bind and trim a 100 page book in less than 5 minutes. Kind of slick at  a cost of less than $10 for the 100 page book ($5 setup and $.045 per page). You can't tell the difference from any other paperback book. Right now the cover can be color but the inside is only B/W. It can also trim the books to any size from about 8.25x10.5 inch maximum. Cool machine. Hopefully they get a full color version soon. It would be excellent for printing blogs. Speakers also spoke about doing consignment distribution and publisizing your book. Dawn was really pleased with the information provided. We arrived downtown about 3pm in time to look around some. I walked out to the wharf and the Beach and Boardwalk amusement park. then returned downtown. We had dinner at the New Leaf Market downtown. I had a turkey meatball calzone and Dawn had a millet yam patty and some potato salad. I topped by dinner with a brownie ala mode at the Marini candy shop nearby. The meeting was at 7pm. We finally departed at 9:20 pm and drove back over the hill home.