Sunset over the Bellingham Harbor, Wash.

First, the bookstore made the announcement through its newsletter, which a lot of bookstores have. But a good newsletter is way to maintain contact with customers. (“Good” being defined as more for the reader than for the sender, not too long, not boring, offline friendly. I don’t know whether Village Books’ newsletter fits my definition, so I’ll go on.)

The biggest and, to my mind, most useful change the bookstore has made is to install the Espresso Book Machine, which will give customers access to out-of-print books and allow them to self-publish in the store. It does not say how long it takes to set up and print the book.

You can set up and order the books through the Village Bookstore website, and then presumably pick it up and perhaps market it at the bookstore. That makes it a very strong competitor against Lulu.com, especially for books with local interest. The bookstore co-owner, Chuck Robinson, is especially interested in volumes on local history.

The other high-tech addition is the sale of Symtio cards in the store, which purchasers can use to download ebooks and audio books.

A novel chosen at random from the Symtio site runs $11.99 for ebook and $14.99 for audiobook. The Kindle version is $7.99 on Amazon (though the Symtio comes in several versions that don’t require the $300 Amazon reader). The same audiobook is $27.99 at Audible.com ($7.49 on a special promotion that requires a $7.49-per-month, three-month commitment).

These are complicated financial calculations beyond my ability to guess what will happen in the market, but the Symtio card seems like a gift item, which makes sense for a bookstore. A lot of my bookstore purchases are gifts. I don’t know how representative that is of the market as a whole.

I hope it works out for them. Even though I confessed yesterday that I don’t enjoy bookstores very much, I want to like them. Innovations like this make it easer.