.jpg?picon=139)
Sometimes the future comes sooner than you think, Print on demand is entering the mainstream. It was just last week when I wrote about authors personalizing POD novels as a marketing tactic and how it could help bring print on demand into mainstream aplication.
This week brings the anouncement of The Obama Time Capsule, a custom, 200 page, print on demand picture book which allows the customer to incorporate their own images and text into the body of the work.
According to this USA Today article, when you order the book you are given 10 days to customize it to your liking.
After ordering the book at Amazon, you'll receive an e-mail with a link that takes you to the Time Capsule website. You'll have 10 days to customize the book there or it will get shipped as is. You get to write a dedication, and your name appears on the cover (and an inside page) as one of the authors, next to Smolan and co-project director Jennifer Erwitt.
You can upload one image to appear on the back cover and another that will appear on a page next to pictures of Sean Penn, George Clooney, Oprah Winfrey and other celebrities. There's also a place-holder for your kid's Obama-related artwork.
At this point the personalization is pretty basic, but I see the options in the future as nearly limitless.
Imagine a kiosk outside the Superbowl where after you have watched the game you can upload your personal photos from your digital camera and mix them in with pro shots taken by photographers that day at the game and have a finished book mailed to you a week later.... Or better yet, have something like the Espresso Book Machine on hand and print the copy right there so you have something to look over while you fight your way out of the parking lot.
Publishers Weekly made the announcement earlier this week that the number of Print on Demand titles on offer overtook the number of titles published in the traditional way last year. The vast (and I mean VAST) majority of these POD titles were super short run books on the extreme end of the long tail, but with the creators of The Obama Time Capsule alerady boasting that they might have the first NY Times bestselling POD in history, its becoming harder to deny that POD really is hitting the mainstream whether we like it or not.