http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espresso_Book_Machine

and

http://www.ondemandbooks.com/home.htm

however the quote
“What Gutenberg’s press did for Europe in the 15th century digitization and the Espresso Book Machine will do for the world tomorrow.”

does remind me of

“It will be more stimulating to the human mind than any new technology since printing.” – Trip Hawkins, boss of Electronic Arts talking about the 3DO computer games system.

I did publish a POD book this winter, an art book of my paintings called BETTER WORLDS…I think I’ve sold about 30 copies. In a way, this is okay, as it cost me zero, nada, $0.00, to create the book file (as a PDF) and to post it on Lulu—and I was happy to be able to buy a few copies of the book to hand out as Christmas gifts. I didn’t bother getting an ISDN code for this book, so it’s not on Amazon.

And E-Reads published my out of print books THE SEX SPHERE and SPACETIME DONUTS as POD editions and as PDF-style e-books. They haven’t made Kindle versions yet, but the PODs are available on Amazon.

Yeah, it sucks that it’s not simple to read PDF on Kindle.

If I were to republish more out of print or unplaceable books of mine as POD and e-book, I might just do it myself—I went with E-Reads because I didn’t want to deal with scanning the old paperbacks into electronic files, or with buying an ISDN code and getting the books on Amazon.

The ISDN and Amazon thing isn’t that hard to do on your own, though, and it only costs you about a hudnred bucks per book, maybe less.

Re. scanning, I’ve learned that, in general, any of my books that’s appeared can be found somewhere online as an electronic pirate edition…I’m not sure where exactly, but I guess I could find out. I garnered this info from Sean Wallace, who’s going to reissue an omnibus “real” (that is, not POD) edition of my four WARE novels in 2010. When I asked him about scanning my old books into files he said that some of my…call them fans…had already done that work.

As for getting your fully edited electronic files of new books from your publishers, that takes a bit of work. As you mention, it is always an issue that you don’t actually have the final version in electronic form, as a lot of the final corrections are made by hand.

Two issues come up. First of all, the publishers don’t really like to give you the files, but if you beg, and are lucky, you can eventually get a PDF of your new book from the publisher. Second of all, rather than distributing this PDF, which would be a kind of piracy of the publisher’s design, you use Adobe Reader Professional to save the PDF into the RTF format, and you can work with that.

I hear rumors that more publishers are talking about a new model under which they ONLY distribute their books via POD and e-book…jwhich is what E-Reads presently does. We’ll see if that pans out for new books. Certainly this would cut the publisher’s upfront costs to the bone…no printing and distribution! Although, again, at this point an author wonders why not just do it on their own. One difference is that a publisher can provide visibility and (in your dreams) a good advertising budget.

I understand an author’s reluctance to release their work in a format that can be endlessly reproduced, but if old titles are selling in the low double digits yearly like Mr. Rucker is saying, why not just release it for cheap through some sort of direct download? What I have little or no understanding of is whether the author has the right to do it, or is this prohibited by some publishing contract? I don’t understand why an author would not have an electronic copy of a book he or she wrote. I assume it is because books are surrendered to publishers where they are edited and rearranged and the author never sees an electronic version of the final product.

I’m reading Postsingular right now, downloaded in Kindle format from ManyBooks.net, and I’m enjoying it. I like it enough that I ended up here from looking for more books by Rudy Rucker. Reading this, it really dismays me to see authors getting so little for their work. And I would be willing to pay to read “The Hollow Earth,” or “The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul” electronically, if I could get those titles in an open format. I’d be more willing if I thought the author actually got more than soda money off the purchase. I want to think of acquiring books in the same way I think of going to the used book store. …$3 for this, $4 for that. Got a little reading material… Can’t I just buy them electronically from the author?

If Amazon won’t back down, one solution may be to sell one’s POD book via multiple printing services, e.g. LSI from your own site, and BookSurge from Amazon. A pain.

Here’s the info from the Author’s Guild:

=======

“Amazon Tightens Grip on Long Tail”

Last week Amazon announced that it would be requiring that all books that it sells that are produced through on-demand means be printed by BookSurge, their in-house on-demand printer/publisher. Amazon pitched this as a customer service matter, a means for more speedily delivering print-on-demand books and allowing for the bundling of shipments with other items purchased at the same time from Amazon. It also put a bit of an environmental spin on the move — claiming less transportation fuel is used (this is unlikely, but that’s another story) when all items are shipped directly from Amazon.

We, and many others, think something else is afoot. Ingram Industries’ Lightning Source is currently the dominant printer for on-demand titles, and they appear to be quite efficient at their task. They ship on-demand titles shortly after they are ordered through Amazon directly to the customer. It’s a nice business for Ingram, since they get a percentage of the sales and a printing fee for every on-demand book they ship. Amazon would be foolish not to covet that business.

What’s the rub? Once Amazon owns the supply chain, it has effective control of much of the “long tail” of publishing — the enormous number of titles that sell in low volumes but which, in aggregate, make a lot of money for the aggregator. Since Amazon has a firm grip on the retailing of these books (it’s uneconomic for physical book stores to stock many of these titles), owning the supply chain would allow it to easily increase its profit margins on these books: it need only insist on buying at a deeper discount — or it can choose to charge more for its printing of the books — to increase its profits. Most publishers could do little but grumble and comply.

We suspect this maneuver by Amazon is far more about profit margin than it is about customer service or fossil fuels. The potential big losers (other than Ingram) if Amazon does impose greater discounts on the industry, are authors — since many are paid for on-demand sales based on the publisher’s gross revenues — and publishers.

We’re reviewing the antitrust and other legal implications of Amazon’s bold move. If you have any information on this matter that you think could be helpful to us, please call us at (212) 563-5904 and ask for the legal services department, or send an e-mail to staff@authorsguild.org.

Feel free to post or forward this message in its entirety.

———————–

Copyright 2008, The Authors Guild. The Authors Guild (www.authorsguild.org) is the nation’s largest society of published book authors.

I think POD is hopeless unless you are able to promote yourself very heavily.

I’d rather offer half a PDF file for free download and charge for downloading the other half. That would be an interesting experiment, with his huge readership. But I have this sneaking feeling that no one would actually pay for the second half, and then I would be really depressed.

I tend to think that writing is going to go through a kind of Golden Dark Age, golden in that everything ever written will be available free, dark in that no one new will be learning “the craft” with any diligence and the supply of new text will degenerate to a huge mass of half-baked commentary. After 50 to 100 years, maybe writing will re-emerge somehow as a fine art.

See, so long as there were gatekeepers (editors) restricting access to the means of publishing, writers had to compete to satisfy the editors, who coudl enforce standards. Also there was the incentive to get paid. But if there are no gatekeepers anymore, you end up with something so egalitarian, writing will degenerate to the textual equivalent of travel photos and videos of a cat playing the piano. I see nothing that can be done about this, and I think you should follow Microsoft’s example when Bill G suddenly understood the Net: “We will recognize existing standards and extend them.” I think we have no other choice alas.

Of course niche publishing for eccentrics who like to buy books will still exist, just the same as oil lamps still exist for people in cabins who don’t like the purple color of battery-powered white LEDs, and logs still exist for people who like to watch burning wood instead of enjoying the silent comfort of forced air heating. But niche-anything has never interested me much.

Soooo, I like paper. Don’t get me wrong. Ebooks seem really cool. I love Flurb! But my eyes really love print. And the rest of me loves being able to put a paperback in my coat pocket and just zooming off somewhere to read. Someday I’m sure there will be a Kindle that’s just right. I don’t think it’s here yet, though.

So, I guess whatever it takes to get these works on paper is what I’ll get behind. It looks like Cory sketched out most of this particular hydra’s characteristics. And shoot, the timing might be just right with all these rebate checks flowing from the guvment this summer, eh?