Traditional production methods of books is in a steady decline. According to Publisher's Weekly, 275,232 new and revised titles were produced by traditional production methods in 2008 which is a 3% decline over the previous year. In contrast POD (print-on-demand) titles rose at an astounding rate of 132%, to 285,394 titles in the same period. Is the traditional book printing age over?
Clearly, Hewlett-Packard has seen these numbers and is launching a web hosted Print-on-Demand (POD) service named BookPrep. As reported in PCWorld 's article titled HP Bets on Print-on-Demand Services, BookPrep will include, among others, 500,000 out-of-print titles from the University of Michigan that were digitized by Google. BookPrep is partnered with Amazon to sell and distribute the books. According to Andrew Bolwell at HP, "There's a fundamental shift taking place in the publishing industry, Print-on-demand is the future."
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