Stephany Aulenback wonders when electronic books and print-on-demand will come into their own.
I think e-books are waiting for the right delivery mechanism, devices that are easier to read from than the tiny screens on PDAs.
But I don’t see any such holdup for print on demand — the hurdles seem to be in people, in old mindsets and inertia. It’s crazy that a finished book takes so long to hit the shelves, that print runs must be so large, that an author can earn just 70 cents per copy sold. It’s too broken a business model to sustain itself much longer.