On Demand Books

It's been the Next Big Thing in the book trade for several years now. Will the print-on-demand kiosks proposed by On Demand Books finally revolutionize the industry?

Right now, it sounds like the inventory of the pricy kiosks is limited to public-domain materials. But I can see this becoming a great boon for scholars, collectors, and readers of authors who works are no longer considered fashionable, even as it decimates the value of secondhand sellers' inventories of previously scarce books.

The dead hand of copyright law, and the ever-lengthening reach of its arm, will be the biggest obstacles to extending this kind of ready accessibility to books published in the last eighty years. Ironically, the books most likely to remain inaccessible are the ones not associated with the giant megapublishers who most vigorously push for ever-lengthening and ever-more-draconian copyright protection. Random House, Knopf, Viking, et al, will no doubt jump on board the print-on-demand train once its fiscal viability is established, either by licensing books to outside vendors like Books On Demand or by setting up similar services of their own. The books whose authors are dead or incommunicado, whose publishers have disappeared or forgotten about their existence, will remain trapped in a legal limbo with no known rightsholder to contact for reprinting rights, and no print-on-demand service whose legal department will allow them to expose themselves to liability should such a rightsholder choose to leap out of the woodwork at some time in the future.