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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."
i dunno, being an old timer zine publisher (since '87) i still kinda sorta miss the days of the gluestick, typewriter and a trip to the kinkos (well, the one where you had a friend who worked the grave yard shift and let you copy your zine for free).
but alas, i must admit that programs like quark (and now indesign) have made things a bit easier... and well, the whole on-demand publishing like lulu (and others) have made the DIY publishing cheaper but also opened up "underground" press (aka small-press) to new audiences.
i mean, there was only so much you could do with your by-hand copied zine... sure passing them out at the shows and begging the local record store owners to carry them was great... but this on demand thing is, well... not only do you get the control (creative) but you also can actually (sorta) compete with the "big boys."
sad robot making broken music
Printing on demand is getting cheaper and better
There was a German transcription for DTP - "Dumme Treiben Plötsinn" (along the lines of "Dumbheads Try Printing"). So it is more likely that language and readability of printed matter will decline/degrade even more. But that does not matter, cause technical quality (10^y dpi, full colour) will be state-of-the-art.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
The software may be good, but output is still another matter. Print has been making great strides in resolution, but laser copy has a tendency to stick to vinyl binders and inkjet runs when wetted.
i'd like a tiny little 4 colour offset press, please.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Well, sure. I don't think this is meant to replace publishers for big books.
But what about for people like me?
I'm currently writing a book, but I'm well aware I'm not a wonderful writer. It is just something I do in my free time if I get bored.
I think it would be fun to be able to give "my book" to friends and family.
And I'm sure this service is marketed to people like me...
Since you can get a hardcover bound copy of your book this way for less than $40 a copy, this would be great for something like wedding pictures; you could print a few copies for parents and wedding party members without spending all the money you got as wedding gifts.
Have you read my blog lately?
As a student photographer I was planning on throwing a bunch of photos together and printing it via apple and iphoto. i looked into it and read some bad reviews of apple's printing methods so i decided to look more into the subject of print on demand. I looked at a ton of options and decided to go with LuLu. I layed out the book myself and uploaded it. Their site gave me a few problems with the formatting but a post to lulu's forums had that solved within a matter of minutes. So after printing a few copies I decided to make it a legit book and acquired an ISBN number for it right through lulu. It's now sold via their website, my website, a few independent bookstores, art galleries, and very soon, Borders and amazon.com. So as a result of using lulu (or any print on demand service) my photos are being seen all over the globe. Print on demand is revolutionizing more than just the literary world.
it just amazes me that the profile of lulu is still so low. vanity press companies have existed for years- squeezing big bucks out of want to be authors. look at how much money gets dumped into the 'be a succesful author' business. along comes lulu and practically drops every economic barrier to entry.
you don't have to worry any more about getting ripped off. write your great american novel, put together your great coffee table book, whatever you want-- and put it out there. lulu keeps on going but i really thought by now it would be much bigger than it is.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
If you know how to use LaTex, you could set up a lulu.com book in about 10 minutes.
LaTex has had a "book" template for years, and true to its purpose as "type-setting sofware" (created by Donald Knuth at Stanford), it creates an absoutely picture perfect document with chapter headings, and eye-pleasing margins and hyphenation. This is all done automatically according to the principles of typography printers have been using for hundreds of years (though of course they can be manually over-riden). All that is required is that you learn a few html-like mark-up commands to format your text.
I've printed one novel with lulu.com and LaTex, and the inner text was easily as good as hard-cover books from the 50s and 60s (which I consider kind of a golden age of printing). The cover though does require some graphic design skill , as I think a professional designer noted above (though lulu.com does have a gallery of about 50 stock covers you can use).
Also, lulu.com was started by Bob Young, founder of Red Hat Linux, because of the terrible experience he had publishing a book through conventional means. I believe lulu.com runs on FOSS software.
I'd like to live in a world where I could click on anything in a publisher's backlist and get it printed and shipped to me.
In such a world, we could try to pass legislation under which refusing to sell a book on a POD basis meant forfeiting the copyright.
In today's world things like "Lord of Light" and the Lensman series have gone out of print, and that is just plain wrong.
Have you taken a look at what does get published? Sure, 90% of POD stuff is crap, but easily 90% of major-publisher stuff is crap too. I'm not even sure the major-publisher percentage is lower; the stuff they publish is more likely to be polished, but also more likely to be formulaic.
Music works similarly; most unsigned bands suck, but most bands on MTV suck too.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I disagree. I'm an avid reader, and never lack for quality material. Sure, the publishing houses produce a lot of crap, too, but unlike MTV there are a lot of choices. Don't like what Tor puts out? Baen has a huge line-up of talent. Don't like any of them, either? Take a browse through Random House's catalog. Prefer smaller, less mainstream stuff? Try out Small Beer Press, publishers of the extremely good 'zine "Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet." Or Wheatland Press. Or... See what I mean? There's a ton of variety out there, and it's not all 'formulaic.' In fact, the single largest complaint I hear from editors is that so much of the slush they have to dig through is formulaic, and gets discarded immediately. The tragedy of POD is that there's no one to tell you, "No, this is just a rehashed Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan-fic with the names changed, and is not of publishable quality."
I'd say the readable stuff -- as in, stuff I personally would consider readable -- coming from the genre publishing houses I like numbers in the 40% range. A lot of that is stuff I still wouldn't choose to read, but it wouldn't specifically offend my eyes, either.
The POD outfits, however, are batting 0. I have never picked up any piece of fiction from one that's been worth reading. The vast majority of it is on par with the Buffy fan-fics I mentioned. A lot of it is the utterly original and unique story of a halfling, an elf, a dwarf, and a mysterious hero on a quest involving an ancient, magic ring.
I know -- or at least, I've heard -- that there are gems that pop up sometimes. But I'm simply not willing to dig through all the steaming piles of... er... manuscripts I'd need to in order to get to them.
That's what the editors at publishing houses, great and small, are for. And frankly I appreciate all their hard work.
Incidentally, I know MTV has editors, too. But they're basically a monopoly unless you know where to go to find good music videos. (Hint: Not television!) And they have a built-in bias toward anything that will sell more Coke advertisements. With professionally edited and published fiction, you have an astonishing range of choices. With MTV you have, well, MTV. And, I suppose VH1. Oh boy, VH1.
Easier, cheaper, and a lot faster than trying to find it in used/collectible, and in general, the only way any record company will ever make money off their content "in the vaults".
Of course, since this is rational, it isn't going to get done until consumer electronics companies start buying up major labels and look at their content as a way to make money instead of something to "stop pirates from getting into".
Then, there's film/video. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to get a DVD burned of ... anything?
There should be no such thing as "backlist - not available" in an age where all usable content regardless of media type is digital.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I believe lulu.com runs on FOSS software.
I think this is incorrect. Many people (including me) have had unpredictable problems with producing books from pdf files output by tex or pdftex. For people using dvi-flavored tex, the standard advice on the lulu forums seems to be to upload the postscript file, and then lulu's server will run it through Adobe Distiller before they send it to their subcontractors, who produce the book using proprietary RIPs. There may be a lot of OSS running on lulu's servers, but it's not all OSS, and proprietary software is definitely involved at various steps in the process.
Find free books.
Speaking as a writer, that's not so true any more. As large(r) corporations have bought up a lot of the smaller or formerly independent publishing houses, the culture has changed. While in the past editors would actually spend a lot of their time editing, nowadays it is much more of a sales/marketing position, with most of the actual editing being done by agents and their staffs. Editors at large publishing houses are now much more worried about how they can market the book: what genre does it fit into?; can it possibly be made into a movie?; are there any spin-off possibilities?; etc. One of the more troubling results of this is vastly increased pressure on writers to have a "successful" book. where the demands of successful have been ratcheted up by the appearance of the blockbuster novel in the 1970s. It is rarer and rarer to find a publisher who will stick with a promising novelist as s/he builds up a base of readership or improves his or her craft, and it is much more common to be dropped by a major published for failing to meet sales expectations. From this perspective, the opportunity of POD opens up new avenues to writers who may find themselves not fitting into the new, corporate publishing world in much the same way that the birth of digital music and downloading has opened up new avenues to musicians and bands.
As to the "self-published authors suck" argument: walk into your closest Barnes & Noble or Borders and pick ten fiction books at random. Read the first few pages. You will probably find that eight or nine of them are somewhere between mediocre and terrible, which is to say that 1) "good" writing is entirely subjective and 2) most books published, now and in the past, have been somewhere between mediocre and terrible. Just because you're published doesn't mean you're a good writer. I know a guy who has published two novels with a respectable publisher. He's not a terribly good writer, but he is related to an agent through marriage, and that was his in. He knows how to work the system, and this is the reason for his success.
Will a writer benefit from a good editor? Absolutely. Is it absolutely necessary? No. And, given the increasingly corporate culture writers now face, the importance of an alternative avenue is more important than ever. In other words, I would rather read a somewhat rough novel written by someone with passion and talent than a well-polished turd by someone writing another novel of the month.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
A somewhat related issue is using a Wiki to prepare contents for a book. I believe that there is lot of future in this since writing is more difficult than formatting, and using a wiki helps to organize ideas and collaborative work (testing it right now).
./ reader went through the experience making a book from Wiki and could tell us how it went ...
Now, for MediaWikis there is a sort of procedure. The German Wikipedia community seems to have the best experience so far and some reader really have been published in paper form.
WikiReader Handbuch and a Magnus' magic MediaWiki-to-XML-to-stuff converter
Btw there is also the idea that one could some day directly produce PDF from Wiki. A script for print on demand is on source forge .
Maybe a