Cafe Press, the purveyors of much merchandise via many websites, are making the logical jump into POD publishing. Read about it in this posting. Interestingly enough, they are also doing POD style "retail ready" CDs, complete with booklets and jewel cases. I think this kind of stuff is positive. As I've written over and over, the vast majority of music I've listened to in the last year or three is not major label stuff. Much of it has been self-produced by the musicians or a small musician run label.

There is consensus received wisdom that says that such material published this way is, of course, crap. Yes, it's true that self-publishing produces howlers such as The Pleistocene Redemption and such. OK, let's accept that as fact. Now, does standard big publishing produce 100% high quality books? Of course not. I see a lot of unreadable shite coming from the big companies (some of it sells very well despite being unreadable by me). A lot of people seem to be very upset by even the notion. There seems to a big buy-in for the "big machine" style of media, at least for books and music. In movies, people understand that the economics mean that the major studios put out a lot of least-common-denominator stuff and the independent films take a lot of the chances and not coincidentally have some of the best work. Somehow, though, that seems to be unheard of in other media.

One of the best books I've read in the last few years was Lois Tilton's Written in Venom. It came out from Wildside, a small press. I don't know the publishing history story behind it, but it definitely is not from the safe, Robert Jordan/Terry Brooks style generic medieval fantasy. It is the story of Norse mythology told from the viewpoint of Loki and it is a fabulous read. It didn't sell well, partly because it is out of the mainstream and not safely the "same old thing (TM)". I recommend highly that anyone who is at all a fan of Norse mythology read this book. You can get it at Fictionwise if you are willing to read it electronically (that's how I did.) This is not a "big machine" book, but it is wonderful. If Wildside hadn't published it and Lois had published it herself, it would have been equally wonderful but it would have had the stink of "self-published" and thus been suspect. Some writers have the sig line something like "Thanks to the internet everyone can be a slush reader." I think that implication is horseshit, that everything that runs through the big machine is automatically better than everything that doesn't. I can tell you that the big machine hasn't done much for me lately to get me music I want to listen to, to fill the FM airwaves with things I want to hear, or give me good books. I'm finding ever more stuff of relevance to me outside the machine. The vast majority of the bookshelves I see are filled with stuff I can't read more than a paragraph of. I don't think the machine should go away, but neither does that mean that being outside the machine is a mark of Cain. Good is good, and it can come from anywhere. I'm glad their are alternatives to the machine and I'm taking advantage of the wherever I can.