I’ll say this slowly. You may now buy print-on-demand books from Harvard University Press. They’ve made a list of 100 out-of-print classics available to be bought one at a time. And these are not crappy xeroxed copies:
“The books in this program are printed as facsimiles of the last edition,” says John Walsh, production manager at the press. “There will be no compromises to typefaces, or to font sizes and margins, and the books appear in their original trim size. Acme has carefully scanned every page of the original. The books are printed on papers that match the weight, shade, caliper, and opacity of those earlier editions. They are bound in cloth, with headbands and reinforced endpapers.”
This looks like a really important story to me but I don’t think I’ve seen it covered anywhere else (and, by the way, the printers involved really are called Acme)
It’s interesting, but not particularly important. Oxford University Press, which is many, many times the size of HUP, has been doing POD for some time. Check out http://www.oup.co.uk/booksellers/pod/
To give an idea of scale, I think OUP is larger than the 10 largest US university presses added together.
Actually, it probably is still important.
1) It’s important to get the word out that they are both doing it, as few people are aware of either one and POD is certainly an interesting technology. It could well revolutionise the publishing industry.
2) OUP may be bigger, but in terms of possible ramifications w.r.t. copyrights (and the concept of copyrights in people’s minds) HUP will be much more interesting, since it lives where the agenda is set. The US. Sad, but true.