Print on Demand Finally Wows me.
I’ve always been skeptical of print-on-demand services as a publishing platform. I think they’re great services if you want to make photo book for someone’s birthday or commemorate a vacation, but you probably aren’t going to get much traction from the medium unless there’s already a demand for your work.*
However, today I saw this:
It’s a print-on-demand photo magazine with images of the recent dust storms in Sydney. The editor compiled it in about a day and a half by soliciting the best images from Flickr and offering it at cost. You can read the whole story on the publisher’s website.
I hadn’t considered that there might be a demand for topical works, but it makes sense. Commemorative issues are big business for periodical publishers, but they tend to target the mass market with special issues about celebrity deaths (Michael Jackson) or historic events (The Moon Landing, Woodstock). With self-publishing, there’s a real opportunity to make a few extra dollars by photographing local events (music festivals, city centennials, Mardi Gras).
What really excites me are the opportunities for citizen journalism. While the web is the fastest and cheapest method for distributing information, there is something powerful about the printed page. Imagine instant magazines featuring a local protest march, or the aftermath of a natural disaster.
*See my friend Curtis’s excellent series The Stigma of Self Publishing.
H/T dooce.com. (Yes, I read a “Mommy Blog”. She’s hot dude.)
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