Posted at Thursday, March 06, 2008  EDT  

Joe Shmo, press baron

Ivor Tossell,  From Friday's Globe and Mail

As terms go, it doesn't really get more patronizing than “vanity press.”

The phrase derives from the idea that, if a book is worth anything, a publishing house will pick it up and try to make money with it. But if you can't get published on the merits of your prose, then you can always just pay your way into print. A vanity press will publish anyone who fronts the cash: love for money when editors and agents can't be courted. It might get you a bound book, but it won't buy respect.

It's an increasingly quaint idea. Though the stigma of the “vanity press” hasn't exactly gone away, it seems outdated – after all, the Internet is a giant vanity press full of self-published content. The spirit of the Web is to put whatever you've got out there, and see if it sticks. (Or rather, where it sticks. Whatever it is, somebody will want to read it.) But even in a world where anyone with the gumption can start a blog, there's something impressive about a bound book. It might be because they haven't proved easy to come by. Either you could invest yourself in the art of bookbinding, spending your evenings fiddling with paper and string and bizarre wooden implements, or, failing sudden success as a published author, slink off to the vanity press.

This is changing. Suddenly, it's becoming possible to have books printed for less cash than you've got in your pocket now. Just as, 20-odd years ago, the affordable laser printer allowed anyone to create professional-looking documents, new technology is taking books out of their rarefied realm and putting the ability to print them square in the mainstream.

Take an outfit called Lulu.com. Lulu prints books in the same way that the office printer prints memos. You send it off, it spits them out, and lets you sell them on its website to boot. For a 200-page paperback, the company charges all of $12, give or take. The product is remarkable: a full-colour cover, honest-to-god binding, and crisp printing.

I write this with the zeal of the converted: I parted with $12, and – with an extra $20 for the courier to work its magic – I held a book in my hands a week later.

A book! An honest-to-God, flip-through-it, read-it-on-the-can, throw-it-at-the-cat book! It is, I have to tell you, a tremendously satisfying feeling.

(Be prepared, though, to take a couple of cracks at it before it comes out right. My first attempt had to be redone owing to margins that were too small. I took the route of laying the book out myself in desktop-publishing software, though tools are available to publish books more crudely from plain word-processing documents.) As a self-publishing implement, Lulu boils down to an elegant way to rent time on one heck of a printer. When you send a book design to Lulu's website, it's routed to one of several printing locations in the United States or Europe. Each of these sports a machine from the folks at Xerox; it's rather like the printer in the corner of your office, except it's the size of a room, and it prints books.

The beauty of these machines is not how many books they can print, but how few. Traditional presses are geared to produce books by the thousand, making them economical for large print runs, but no good at producing, say, a handful of books. Print-on-demand machines, on the other hand, incur no overhead for producing a single copy.

This means that a professor could print small runs of textbooks, updated every time she teaches a course. A true romantic could print five copies of his poetry collection for Valentine's Day, each one featuring a different dedication to one of his five girlfriends.

This same technology has enabled Lulu to become a marketplace for self-published works. You can set a price for your book, and advertise it on the Lulu website, or even on sites such as Amazon.com. With a digital copy of your book on file, Lulu prints it only after somebody has ordered it. (Copyright remains vested with the author; Lulu is adamant that it's a technology tool, not a publishing house. It trusts people not to trod on others' copyrights, and pulls books if someone complains of plagiarism.) Evidently, traditional vanity presses – used to charging more, taking longer, and casually insulting people with their names – will find themselves under the gun. But watch for bigger players to seize on this technology too.

According to Rowland Lorimer of the Canadian Centre for Studies in Publishing at Simon Fraser University, regular printing presses will continue to fill bookstore shelves with new releases and bestsellers. But once titles have disappeared from store shelves, publishers (or even large retailers) can use print-on-demand machines to produce single copies whenever someone wants to pay for one. It could be that few books will ever be truly out of print again, as the “long tail” of back-catalogue material opens to the public.

At the same time, it means that books will lose their special status. The mere existence of a book with your name on the spine will no longer mean as much; nor will putting out one of your own make you look hopelessly self-absorbed.

Instead, books will become workaday self-promotional tools, much like blogs. And, also like blogs, they'll fly or fail on their merits: The good ones will find an audience – and maybe even get picked up by real publishers – while the lousy ones will be forgotten. Publishing your own book won't necessarily be an act of vanity. It might merely be in vain.