Examining the Era of Print-on-Demand

tonywong writes "Printing on demand is getting cheaper and better every year. The New York Times has this a review of sites that offer simple DTP programs for free to lure potential publishers. The article claims that the print run can be as little as a single copy on demand." From the article: "Blurb.com's design software, which is still in beta testing, comes with a number of templates for different genres like cookbooks, photo collections and poetry books. Once one is chosen, it automatically lays out the page and lets the designer fill in the photographs and text by cutting and pasting. If the designer wants to tweak some details of the template -- say, the position of a page number or a background color -- the changes affect all the pages. The software is markedly easier to use -- although less capable -- than InDesign from Adobe or Quark XPress, professional publishing packages that cost around $700. It is also free because Blurb expects to make money from printing the book."

Comments

Re:As a designer...

[Anne_Nonymous]

>> a copy of "Baby's First Shit"

Actually that got quite good reviews in the Times and Atlantic Monthly.

Re:old school

[Bastard of Subhumani]

"Hey Rob, remember how much fun you had on Space Mountain last year? Walt Disney World wants to invite you and your wife Andrea back for another ride ..."

Unfortunately, not only does the timestamp on the picture coincide with the regional sales conference, the picture itself depicts him with Julie, the long-legged redhead from accounts.

Since we're on the subject... not so shiny writing

[WWWWolf]

Writer Beware's blog linked recently to "Opening paragraphs of recent PODs that yielded an abbreviated read".

...all this makes me wonder why there's no Emergency Editor Squad (operating under the Language Police). =)