I cribbed this from Warren Ellis.

* Createspace.com: Amazon’s Print On Demand operation. Very interesting. For no money at all, you can create a book (or CD or DVD or whatever), get an Amazon Buy It Now badge for your website, and let them take care of everything else. I understand Lulu and other POD operations are very good, but this is the killer app: you get Amazon’s distribution system. This is massive.

* Why is it massive? It’s fucking AMAZON. Self-publishing turns into a one-click deal. In fact, POD on this order transcends self-pub and vanity pub to a large extent.
It re-enables the small press for the new generation. You youngsters won’t remember what it was like, looking through fringe bookstores for the odd things, the new things, the weird things — things that were small and important, which people had had to gamble real money on the production and printing of. I still have boxes and boxes of this sort of thing from the 80s….

* Also, just as an aside: given that sf magazines pay$50/1000 words and don’t publish much that’s over 15000 words, a determined sf
writer could release POD books in the novellette/novella length. Or even band together and create a POD imprint inside Createspace.

What possibilities emanate from this? I can think of quite a few….