THE BOOKSELLER

He's slender, mid-sixties, with thick glasses that slip far down his long nose. His hands shake a bit, and I can't tell whether it's a palsy or if he's just nervous.

To call him "bookish" would be an understatement.

I didn't know what to think, when that Mexican girl and her little brother showed up at my house with that machine.

They just knocked on my door one day. Lookin' like they'd been out in the sun for a while. I thought they might be sellin' girl scout cookies or some such thing. But no, they wanted to show me a machine. They said they were giving them away. I thought, well, this sounds like a scam if I've ever seen one, but I'll humor them. So I agreed to look at whatever it was they were selling.

They rolled this big hunk of metal out of a car. I didn't know what it was. Would never have imagined. They had it on a little wagon. Asked me if they could take it inside to show me how it worked. I said, sure, because at this point my I was really gettin' curious.

They spent about 10 minutes showin' me all the things it could do. I was just stunned. Just the idea that you could make food out of nothin'. It still doesn't make sense to me now. I barely believed it when they first showed me

The girl, she started talking about how important it was to spread the reps. That was the first time I heard that word: reps. She said she wanted to make sure that everybody who wanted a replicator could get one. And she asked me, would I help her. I said, sure. So she showed me how to print out new replicator parts from the one I had. Then she put the parts together and plugged in the new machine on the counter. She said, "This one is yours to keep."

I was so excited, I barely heard anything else she said. I was already thinking about how I was gonna use this machine to make copies of all my favorite books, so I could give them to my grandkids.

The girl cautioned me, a bit, then. She said that while it would be wonderful if I could print out replicator parts and give them to other people, it was possible that the police might not like it. She advised me to keep it "on the down-low."

That scared me a little bit. I wasn't sure I wanted to get involved in anything illegal.

So, I'm ashamed to say, after that girl left, I decided I wasn't gonna risk printing out replicator parts for anybody else. But I could help in other ways. I started thinking about the moral responsibility I had. Like, how could I use this machine to make the world a better place? And the first thing that came into my mind, again, was books. I guess, you know, I've always believed in books. In their power to change people. Especially young people, when they're just beginning to learn how the world works.

The biggest risk for young people is that they'll find some goddamned ideology that satisfies their curiosity. And then that's all the learnin' they do. They get a belief system installed, just like you install an operating system. And they spend the rest of their lives as zombies. Books are the cure for that. They help you see things through other peoples' eyes. Books are telekinesis. They're magic. I really believe that.

So I started gettin' books. I scanned a few different basic foods into my replicator, and the rest of the slots I filled up with books. I started with the classics. Just printin' out dozens upon dozens of Steinbecks, and Twains, and Dostoyevskys, every hour. I had a pretty big library of my own in my house, you know? So I built up a catalog of about 1,000 different books. Hundreds of copies each.

And then I opened a store on eBay.

I was basically givin' books away. All people had to do was pay the cost of shipping, which was usually between $2.75 and $4, depending on how heavy the book was. I figured, okay, I've got everything I need from the replicator. Food, water, household supplies, all that. I didn't need to go to work anymore. So I could dedicate my days to shippin' books to my buyers.

The business started off small. Ten, twenty books a day. But at some point I made the decision to expand into best-sellers. Recent books. All for $0 plus shipping on my eBay store. That was when sales really started taking off. Every day I spent the mornin' ordering new books for my catalog. Then, in the afternoon, I'd head to the post office and ship off all the books my customers had ordered. Rinse and repeat. Within the first few days, I was shippin' 50 books per day. By the end of the first week, it was a few hundred. And mostly people were buyin' the best-sellers.

Now, obviously, it's one thing to print copies of classics—the writers for those books are already dead anyway, right, so they won't miss the money. But to my thinkin', if your book is already on the best-sellers list, you probably won't notice if I sell a few hundred repped copies of your book

The best part of my day was when I'd get up and read the reviews from customers. They were so excited to get books for cheap. And I started gettin' kind letters from people thankin' me for selling these brand-new books for nearly free. A lot of people asked me how I did it, and I just said, "I have a great source." (Laughs.)

One guy from Oklahoma wrote in to ask if he could order in bulk, for his school's library. I said sure, and that I could cut the price of shippin' down to something like 75 cents per book if he ordered at least 40 at a time. Well, he took me up on my word and started buyin' out my entire stock, every day. Thousands upon thousands of books. The people at my local post office started sort of laughin' at me when they'd see me come in, like, "Here he comes with another truckload." But it was good business for them, so they didn't mind.

For like a week straight this one buyer from Oklahoma was buying my stock out completely. I could only print 500 or so per day if I ran the rep all day, and that was getting to be sort of stressful. So I started wondering, you know, how many books does this guy need? In particular, he was buying many, many copies of the new best-sellers. Forty or fifty of them each. And totally wiping out my back catalog too. Literally, he was the only person able to buy from my store for these two weeks, because I just couldn't print books fast enough.

Well, at the end of the second week, I realized what was happening. He had set up his own online store and was selling the books for a profit. Five bucks apiece, plus shipping, so he could still beat out everybody else on the market.

That near about broke my heart. I had basically worked for this guy for free for two weeks, just so he could make a few thousand in profits upsellin' my books to somebody else. It really pissed me off. You know, in his mind, he probably thought he'd just found a smart money-makin' opportunity. He wasn't thinkin' about the ethics of the whole thing. But I felt really distraught. I shut down the bookstore altogether after that.

My timing on that was good, by the way, because that second week was right about the time that federal agents started knockin' on peoples' doors and askin' if they'd seen or heard "anything suspicious" about some sort of advanced "3D printing" machines. That's what they called it. When they came to me, I said, nope. Nothin' but books in here. And they went on their way.

They didn't search your house to see if you had a rep?

Nah. I must look like an honest citizen. Or at least, a harmless old man. (Laughs.)

A lot of "harmless" old folks like me spread the reps, in those early days.