Vision or visionary?

This very interesting article details what I got into my head would be a business model for print-on-demand. I'm sure I read about it somewhere, that "someday" there would be a kiosk in every store and the buyer could just 'dial up' the book he wanted, go have a cup of coffee, come back and collect the book.

Then that vision morphed into doing the same with electronic books on something like an SD card or via a cable to your reading device. Then the internet got much faster than my dial-up (thank goodness!) and that vision had every good reason to go away. Plus, enter readers better than my Rocket 1100.

But I find the article out of Vermont very interesting. Need a copy of something and 1) you don't have a bookstore in your town other than Walmart, 2) the library can oblige you only by interlibrary loan which is a wonderful service, but it'll be two weeks, or 3) Amazon is currently sold out? Just download and print on the neighborhood machine.

The machine is frightfully expensive, but then the industry is watching this small store in Vermont to see how it all goes. At the moment, very well.

Saying good-bye to a blog

No, not mine!

But the first blog I started reading, POD-dy Mouth. Before then, I had not given blogs any thought, and certainly didn't read them. What a waste of time!

However, a blog about the good and better of print-on-demand publishing interested me and I was immediately hooked. I submitted one of my works, but it wasn't chosen to be reviewed. That's the bad news. The good news is that snippets of it weren't chosen to be villified, either!

But as of yesterday, POD-dy Mouth has closed shop, having worn herself out doing an extraordinary job of showing the world that small press/self-publication and sub-par books are not always synonymous. I, for one--and I imagine I'm not alone, will deeply miss her.

So hurry over and indulge in wit and insight. She didn't say how long she would let those words stay around.