Looks like the major player in bookselling these days has decided that print-on-demand is the coming thing:

Multiple HP Indigo digital presses have been installed at Amazon fulfillment centers and are now producing full-color books on demand as well as color covers for black and white books.

Why?

The books-on-demand market is expected to grow from approximately 20 billion book pages in 2006 to approximately 38 billion book pages by 2009. This is due chiefly to the increasing demand for small-volume, rare and self-published books.

This is great news for book lovers around the world. No innovation in print publishing today can take off without the backing of the 800-pound gorilla in the virtual room, and this is Amazon saying that POD is not only here to stay but is set to take off. This will make it even easier for boutique publishers like Cosimo to continue our mission to bring back into print — in attractive new editions — lost classics that have been unavailable to readers for decades, and longer, and to bring to light the work of new authors with more select readerships than those the corporate publishing houses deign to deal with.

It’s an exciting time to be a reader and a writer…

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