Interesting article in SSP”s Scholarly Kitchen by Joseph Espisito, “The POD Booby Trap and the Lure of Open Access Books.”  Espisito discusses “the booby trap” of open access, stating, “The unfortunate, unstated premise of those who fall into the POD booby trap is that they really don’t and can’t believe in the emerging primacy of [...]

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Ingram announced on June 9th a partnership with Pedia Press to POD customized books created from wiki material. Pedia Press supports the “Create a Book” feature within Wikipedia and other wiki based sites.

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Ingram Content Group’s Lightning Source POD has introduced several new features including: new color interior hardcover book options, additional trim sizes for black and white interior books, expanded page count options for both perfect bound and hardcover books and a multi-volume set option, commonly used in the academic sector. 

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Springer has offered the MyCopy service in the US and Canada since 2008.  It was so successful, they are now expanding the service to European library users.  MyCopy offers a POD copy to users at $24.95.  More from Springer: After the successful launch in the US and Canada, Springer Science+Business Media has extended its MyCopy [...]

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Baker & Taylor recently announced a partnership with Information Age Publishing  and Wiley (announcement) for print on demand services.  Using B & T’s Textstream Digital Print Service, over 1,000 backfiles from Information Age Publishing and a wide variety of backfile titles from Wiley will now be available POD for B & T customers. B & [...]

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Bowker released a report today on U.S. Book production.  Among their projections:  U.S. book production in 2009 remained flat but 2009 was an extraordinary year of growth for “non-traditional” books.  According to the press release,  these [non-traditional] books, marketed almost exclusively on the web, are largely on-demand titles produced by reprint houses specializing in public [...]

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A new Off The Shelf Column in Reference Books Bulletin (Booklist) explores open access e-textbooks.  The CK12 Foundation, Connexions, Flatworld Knowledge, and Merlot are discussed.  Other Off The Shelf pieces are on the articles page.

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I am reproducing this post from the teleread blog, thanks Paul! Flat World, the publisher of commercial open source college textbooks, had partnered with Barnes & Noble College Booksellers and NACS Media Solutions to distribute their textbooks to over 3,000 college bookstores for the fall semester. These are pilot programs and will launch in August. [...]

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Expect to find print on demand textbooks and other academic and trade titles available for POD in college bookstores very soon.  From a press release, “NACS Media Solutions (NMS), a subsidiary of the National Association of College Stores (NACS) and On Demand Books LLC (ODB), the maker of the Espresso Book Machine® (EBM), have entered [...]

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Earlier this week I attended the O’Reilly Tools of Change (TOC) Conference for the first time.  Over 1250 attendees gathered in New York City to discuss and network   about issues and trends in publishing, in particular, digital publishing.  While much of the information presented was for the publishing industry, I did manage to find several [...]

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