Things to Make and POD

The lovely Miss Gemma Leigh recently pointed us in the direction of some ace (and totally official) prints you can now buy, that are taken from the Ladybird books archive [ladybirdprints.com]. Cabinet [picturecabinet.com] is the name of the company behind the venture. They reproduce the archival images on a ‘print-on-demand’ basis through memoryprints [memoryprints.com] and also offer image archival services. They certainly seem to be doing something right, having chalked up an impressive list of clients in a short space of time. The National Theatre [ntposters.org.uk] (the Eqqus poster from the 1970s is pretty cool), the V&A [vandaprints.com] and The Royal Photographic Society are just some of the organisations that very signed up.

The POD Report

Weather and blogging. It’s funny how page views from different countries go up and down depending on whether it’s summer or winter. It happens with blog posts too and it’s the primary reason why I’ve been meaning to post this for a while but haven’t got round to it until now (sorry).
 
Firstly, it you are interested in POD (Print-on-Demand) [wikipedia] productions at all – and, in terms of minimising the effect print production has on our environment, it’s something we should all be interested in – you should head over to Andrew Losowsky’s Magtastic Blogsplosion [losowsky.com/magtastic]. Andrew welcomes another POD provider into the fold, MagCloud [magcloud.com].
 
MagCloud is worth noting because, as Andrew points out, a) they talk exclusively about magazines and b) Hewlett Packard are behind this one, so there’s the hint that printer manufacturers are taking POD seriously indeed. What I found particularly interesting is that Andrew highlights the fact that POD services are too often pitched at hobbyists. While it seems perfectly fine to be producing magazines about your dog or your cousin’s wedding for a select group of friends and kinfolk (who you would probably end up buying copies for on their behalf anyway), it also dilutes the real benefits of POD production could provide to larger commercial entities such as newsstand titles or those simply wishing to reach a boarder international audience.
 
Essentially, someone needs to work out a way, to use one of those nifty internet terminologies, to further ‘monetise’ POD publications. To make them more commercially viable (ie cheaper and easier to distribute). MagCloud is a tiny glimmer of hope that this might be possible, but without mixing up the amateurs and the professionals it’s not far enough removed from yer lulus [lulu.com] and yer bobbooks [bobbooks.co.uk] to make any real progress. (As a sidenote, why do POD providers never have a ‘design’ category in their topic lists and should we be worried about it’s exclusion (when Art & Photography gets a look-in almost everytime)? I’m guessing the answer has to be ‘yes’.)

I recently received an invitation to contribute to a magazine on Issuu [issuu.com], a site Andrew mentions in the same article. Although, I personally find the navigation a little convoluted, especially when trying to decide wether to ‘bookmark’ or ‘follow’ a particular edition or user, Issuu should be of interest to POD providers because it unwittingly shows them a new format for distribution that is lively and exciting and manages to swerve past many of the pitfalls of ‘vanity publishing’ [wikipedia] (’Vanity publishing’ refers to publications produced at the expense of the author but has, in recent times, also been used to refer to POD authors, although with POD, these authors only incur costs of they purchase the books themselves).

Which brings me neatly round to a brief update on Press Publish’s (the boicozine mothership) very own publishing projects and where they’re at [presspublish.info].
 
mm (millimetre) We’ve been planning our next POD publication for some time now. mm (millimetre) magazine happily provoked quite a bit of interest when we originally announced the project. Unfortunately, it’s still on hold until your humble author (ie Me) finds the time and the appropriate POD producer to hook up with to the help produce the publication on a regular basis. The original thought was to use a number of POD producers to expand the magazines coverage, although they would each have their own formats so the magazine would need to be reformatted each time or produced in a way them was applicable to each one. See, tricky, huh. So that may still happen although we’re personally holding out to see if MagCloud is any good. More news as it comes to hand.
 
Estates of London Hopefully the next project to roll off the ‘presses’ (can you say that with POD?) will be the Estates of London project which we’re hoping to produce via Blurb [blurb.com] (who are currently holding a POD photographic book competition worth checking out).
 
Estates of London will be a visual survey of post-war housing estate architecture in London. Something we feel has been neglected for years and yet have had a massive impact on the fabric of modern Britain. There will be more about this project here and over on our Flickr site in the coming weeks. If you are interested in helping out with this project we’d love to hear from you. Email [michael at presspublish.info].
 
Anomalies The main problem/joy with Press Publish is that we have sooo many ideas that it’s tricky to keep them all moving at once. Along with boicozine, mm and Estates, there is also the boicoshop which is coming together nicely (more product to come!) and a follow up to Zine #1 [shop.boico.net], documenting more posts from the boicozine blog.
 
It’s for this reason too that Press Publish is looking for a business partner to help get things moving. It’s grass roots stuff so previous experience isn’t necessarily required but if you do have experience in the publishing field we’d love to hear from you. Again email Email [michael at presspublish.info] for further information.