On Thu, Jun 06, 2002 at 10:21:53AM -0400, wlt4@mindspring.com wrote:
first as a point-of-purchase (read: record >store) kiosk system, like a photo booth where >you'd buy custom burned CDs with high quality >color artwork, and then more recently as
The book industry has also been experimenting with this. There have been trial runs in individual stores that I don't think were too successful (demand too low for the cost) but many publishers, especially on the more academic end, have custom publishing systems set up internally. The quality is passable and I suspect most customers might not notice but any book person can recognize these immediately. The idea of keeping more titles in print without the expense of huge inventories is attractive.
My experience with Print On Demand has been quite good. I used Lightning Source (a print on demand printer owned by Ingram, who I think are the biggest book distributor, with the result that books printed via Lightning Source are available via just about any bookseller) in publishing "Surprise Me with Beauty". Before agreeing to it, I asked them for some sample books. When I got them, my fairly finicky eye could not tell any difference between them and conventional books. I also torture-tested them, throwing them across the room in several different ways, spilling coffee on them, leaving them on my dashboard in the summer sun for a week, etc. In each case they held up exactly as well as other books that I similarly tested. And, while the up-front costs to printing my previous book conventionally came to several thousand dollars (and, a decade later, I still have a couple of boxfulls of them), the upfront costs on this were well under $200. Any small publisher who would want to put out books within their (quite reasonable) specifications would do well to check them out. ( http://www.lightningsource.com/ for the curious ). I can see that doing the same for CDs would be more difficult, but not completely unimaginable. BTW, CDs from MP3.com work pretty much the same way (though they turn out to be CD-Rs, not "real" CDs, if that matters to people). -- | jzitt@metatronpress.com http://www.josephzitt.com/ | | http://www.metatronpress.com/jzitt/ http://www.mp3.com/josephzitt/ | | == New book: Surprise Me with Beauty: the Music of Human Systems == | | Comma / Gray Code Silence: the John Cage Discussion List |