First, I share Aaron’s wonder at Big Publishing’s slow grasp of digital publication. The whole concept of “out-of-print” is rendered obsolete by print on demand technologies, so why isn’t Big Publishing rushing to get their OOP catalogs available? Get that long tail working in their favor. (That said, the WebVan episode may be instructive. It looked like they were going to crush the bricks-and-mortar Safeways and such, but in truth they couldn’t compete. When they crashed, Safeway amped up their online service and used vans just like WebVan’s. I’m convinced they were indeed former WebVan vans, bought at fire sale prices.)

Second, how interesting how there is no longer any “one way” of doing things. Crafted books, Scribd, POD, online zines… Everything is a piece of larger, improvised approaches to publishing, with still other pieces no doubt waiting in the wings.

Talk about exciting times!