I am currently reading The Long Tail – very good book and even has a blog associated with it.
In one of the sections talking about how Amazon had changed the way books were sold, the author mentioned that Amazon actually have printing facilities available to them on site so that if they run out of copies of books they can just print some extra ones. I don’t know how I missed this but I had a look on Google and Amazon did in fact acquire an on demand printing company three years ago.
Sounds like a brilliant idea to cut down on wastage of unsold books although I imagine the overall printing cost per book would be higher if you excluded the cost of waste.
I’ve been told that InfoQ have a similar sort of idea going on whereby if you have a book you’d like to publish you can go to them and get it printed at a far cheaper cost than would be possible with a normal publisher. I couldn’t find anything on their website beyond the new ‘mini books’ series they have started running, but that does provide an email address to get more details so it could well be true. If so it’s great to see that it’s becoming easier for your average person to have their voice heard.
Posted by Mark Needham 
