Friday, September 01, 2006

DIY, the publishing version

On one hand, you give up the exposure that a national publisher can potentially bring to you, leaving you to do all the shuck-and-jive promotional legwork yourself. On the other, you make more off the enterprise and your stuff gets out there with a minimum of interference from pencil-pushers. Either way, it's still up to you to make sure that your stuff is worth a damn.
Publishers such as O'Reilly Media, which is known for tackling cutting-edge tech subjects, are using print-on-demand technology to serve customers in new ways. For instance, O'Reilly's SafariU.com platform caters to professors who want to build their own custom textbooks by combining selected chapters from other texts, course notes and article handouts.

O'Reilly handles all the copyright issues. He also does the index, designs a cover for the new book and oversees printing. The cost for a 200-page book is $32, vastly cheaper than the average cost of a new college textbook, which Pearson Education says is about $125.

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