There’s a raging debate taking place on a couple blogs (here and here) about the legitimacy of Publishing on Demand (POD). Neville and I will kick this around on tomorrow’s FIR; I’ve left a few comments on both blogs, if you’re curious about where I stand.

I forwarded these links to a good friend, Mike Vincenty, who works at Blurb, a POD company that is doing blockbuster business. He pointed out—rightly so—that there is a vast difference between POD and the old vanity press concept. Vanity publishers still required a minimum press run, whereas POD allows for as few as only a single copy. This makes it easy for people to publish books who have no interest in selling them. For example, wedding albums could go the way of the dinosaur as people publish actual books of their weddings for distribution to friends and family. This use of POD makes the assertion that the only good books are ones that old-guard publishers will publish a ridiculous one.

But Mike also told me that a lot of people are starting to use Blurb for business purposes. When I asked for an example, he told me that early iterations of annual reports are published through Blurb for distribution to people who need to approve the content, allowing them to see exactly how the finished product will look. I suspect the day is fast approaching when bluelines will appear in museums as artifacts because nobody produces them anymore. (If you’ve never worked in print, a blueline proof is a copy of a project slated for printing that the printer creates by making a photographic print from the negative that will be used to create the offset press plate; the photographic paper produces a purely blue image.)

I was amazed I hadn’t heard of this use of POD before…or that I hadn’t thought of it. Mike is putting me in touch with Blurb’s PR guy so I can arrange an FIR interview and learn about other business uses of POD.

A.J. Liebling once said that freedom of the press is a right reserved for those who own one. Those days are clearly over.