The digital revolution in self-publishing and micro-publishing
You may have heard the news the other month that Faber&Faber launched a range of print-on-demand (PoD) out-of-print books. Digital printing has made it possible to fix the price of printing per copy regardless of the size of the order, which has made micro-publishing much more economical. Service providers have caught up with the technologies, meaning that for those people who still want hard-copy, self-publishing (circumventing publishers and agents, publishing minority-interest material) is finally an affordable reality.One example (which I'll talk about here because it's the leading self-publishing service and 2008 Web 2.0 award winner - but there are others, including WritersWorld and AuthorsOnline) is a company called Lulu. If you want to publish a book you upload the file to Lulu, choose a binding, and provide any artwork. Each copy is created as Lulu receives an order, costs are reasonable and if you're selling you can charge what you like. There are no set-up or hosting fees either.
There are distribution services to choose from. Either you ($99.95) or Lulu (free) can be the publisher. These include an ISBN, which allows work to be registered in bibliographic databases or sold outside Lulu in online bookshops (not physical ones, since Lulu won't accept returns). If you decide to distribute through Lulu, Lulu tracks and pays you royalties, taking a 20% cut. If you opt to be your own publisher, you can choose from a range of licences too - including standard copyright, GNU and Creative Commons Public Domain. You don't have to publish at all - you can just use Lulu as a binding service and keep your work private.
So that's the state of self-publishing today. Brace yourselves for a glut of vanity publishing, conspiracy theory and plain dross, as well as a happy proliferation of minority-interest gems.