You're an Author? Me too! The trend of increasing authorship and decreasing readership.
posted by stbalbach on Apr 26, 2008 - 61 comments

Amazon.com dropped a bombshell on the publishing industry with the announcement on Friday that they will no longer allow print on demand books printed by vendors other than Amazon, to be sold directly by Amazon. In other words, use our print services or lose your listing on our site. This decision effects over half a million books listed on their site and could be a defining moment for both publishing and the future of online retailing. [more inside]
posted by Toekneesan on Apr 3, 2008 - 43 comments

Public Domain Books Reprints Service is "an experimental non-commercial project to re-print public domain books". It's the first service I have seen that allows simple affordable one-off point and click facsimile paperback replication of any book at Google Books or Internet Archive (millions of books). Curious how it works? Each book includes the technical details (Perl+Ghostscript+DJVU+XLST+etc..). The "experiment" has been running since November and is created by Yakov Shafranovich, a Russian Jewish immigrant in Baltimore of many talents.
posted by stbalbach on Jan 10, 2008 - 17 comments

POD-dy Mouth - a blog reviewing the best of print-on-demand (self-published) books: "finding needles, discarding hay". Also with commentary on the industry itself, and great snark (1, 2). Take her quiz: can you spot the POD excerpts from the traditionally published? (Answers here.)
posted by Melinika on Aug 12, 2006 - 9 comments

Have your rejection letters printed onto toilet paper. Meanwhile, a small UK publisher has posted a thoughtful open rejection letter.
posted by staggernation on Jun 13, 2006 - 25 comments

"When I first saw it, I knew it would be as important as Gutenberg." Hyperbole aside, PerfectBook -- a machine that spits out a complete book from a digital file within minutes -- sounds intriguing. What's more, "a distracted teenager could run it."
posted by mw on Jul 9, 2001 - 18 comments