Print-on-Demand is a technology waiting for the right moment. It is an esssential component of the Long Tail (talk about your dinner conversation topic!). We believe Amazon’s purchase of BookSurge will lead to lower prices and wider usage.
Dan Wickett (have we mentioned him today?) guests over at Conversational Reading, discussing his experiences with POD. He touches on something that had us knitting our delicate brow. Books that go through the Author Guild’s Back In Print program are apparently copies of the original books. If you’re thinking standing-in-front-of-the-Xerox-machine, you are apparently thinking right. This makes sense for really old works, but not so much for books where electronic versions exist on hard drives.
We remain fascinated by the potential of POD and the implications it can have. So much so that we’re excited about the inevitable rights discussions sure to ensue. Exciting! For the authors, even more so:
For Richard Grayson it was simple. “I could have paid more to get something other than their non-uniform cover and I could have paid to have an author photo, but basically I was just trying to keep the work in print to have a record that the books existed.”
