Someday Print on Demand Will Work

This morning while trolling for editorial clients, I fell into American Web Books. AWB is a subsidiary of Applewood Press, whose main business appears to be re-publishing historical works that are in the public domain. Ho hum. AWB takes this in a new direction and publishes public domain works based on the suggestions and requests of registered visitors to the site. So, if I suggest a new edition of Treasure Island, and AWB gets 100 orders for the book, they’ll print and ship them. They also offer book packagaing to organizations (‘PartnerPublishers’) looking to rescue out-of-print public domain works, and, of course, vanity publishing. Essentially, they’re trying to drive business to the Print on Demand service they run.
The ‘suggest and vote’ idea is interesting. Out of print titles with an audience too small to justify ‘real’ publication get a new life, and AWB doesn’t have to guess what people might buy before they design and print books. A great idea, but from the looks of things the idea is not even covering the cost of the website. Maybe not enough people are aware of the service, or maybe not that many people are interested in saving out of print books. Amazon might be able to do something with this…