Saturday, April 23, 2005

freedom of press is for those who have one

Lifehacker has some notes on digital vanity press - places like lulu.com, cafepress.com, and gorhamprinting.com that enable you to publish your own books. These services are great - no overhead or outlay for you, and all told you make more per book than you would through a publisher, providing of course you can get people to buy your book - the advertising burden is yours alone.

These sites are especially useful if all you want is a one-off for a gift or something... why go to Kinko's when you can just upload a file, charge it to your credit card, and wait for your professionally published book to show up in the mail. This is what the internet should be all about - giving the people access to information and enabling them to act on it. The new business model is 'there is no new business model'.