This Changes Everything: Easy Print On Demand

Peter Rukavina

CafePress has announced their new CafePress Publishing system. You create a book as a PDF, upload it to their server, and they print and bind copies of your book, on demand, for as little as $4/book plus 4.5 cents/page.

This means there’s no longer any entry barrier to print publishing: no start-up costs, no inventory, no publishers.

Will we take advantage of this?

Comments

Submitted by Rob Paterson on

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One of the new futures is surely here or close. The huge breakthrough for books will be local high speed printing or binding. All the costs are now as it were bound into these two areas whuch drive inventory and transport.

Take inventory and transport out and most of the costs and barriers fall away. Some have said that ebooks are the thing but when we look at a screen we access the image side of our brain - why we only read snippets on the web. Paper is so useful - read in bed, on plane, in bath etc.

Submitted by DerekMac on

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Usability guru Jakob Nielson, in his recent article “PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption” (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/…, brings up a 1996 article he wrote, “In defense of print” (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/… in which he states the obvious, “that users do like the ability to
get long documents in hardcopy”. Products like this “print- on-demand” capability from CafePress, will help to deliver this capability until we get computer displays with the usability of paper.
As for these displays, they are on the way. Check out
http://www.e-ink.com/news/rele… and
http://www.businessedge.ca/Vie….

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Photo of Peter RukavinaI am . I am a writer, letterpress printer, and a curious person.

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