bryant

CaféPress has plans to get into the print on demand business. (Via Boing Boing.) They're talking about CDs and DVDs, too:

He does, however, tell me CaféPress has exciting plans to expand into publishing in early 2003: The company's media-services division will offer print-on-demand books, audio CDs and DVDs. Using the same general principle, it'll produce, to order, your novel, album or film with glossy covers and jewel-box inserts, a move that has revolutionary possibilities. And though self-publishing already exists on the Web, CaféPress has honed the production-and-fulfillment process to make it far more viable.

While print on demand has been around for a while, and hasn't had that much of an effect on the publishing industry, CaféPress will be taking a lot more of the hard work on; they'll provide the ISBN number, which is essential for bookstore distribution. This is kind of interesting, since if the books will only be available via CaféPress, you'd think the ISBN would be less important. The article hints at Amazon distribution, but that may just be something the reporter came up with.

In any case, though, this is going to be a lot easier for writers than the previous print on demand offerings. At the moment, you need to write your book, then go out and getting a set of ISBN numbers, then convince someone like Lightning Source that you're worth doing business with. (They used to be fairly liberal in who they'd accept as customers, but handholding newbies through the process was killing their profit margins.) If you can just upload a formatted PDF file and click 'Purchase,' well, that'll open up a lot of possibilities.