In any case, the superstores and Amazon.com have by no means reached the end state of the publishing industry’s book-to-reader vision, nor do libraries seem to have much of a role in that next vision either. If, some ponder, the bookstore (whether physical or virtual) can unite the reader with in-print books, why not add out-of-print books to the service as well? Why could a reader not enter a bookstore, request an out-of-print item, and leave the store with it 15 minutes later, printed and bound, paying a retail book price? Or why not find that book on one’s own computer? The concept of books on demand (or OD, as some industry analysts call it) has been in gestation for some time. For example, in the early 1990s, Xerox partnered with a few large publishing houses in an OD experiment. The products were acceptable, but computer servers and network pipelines were less capacious than today and so the results were slow. The need to resolve rights and permissions issues also posed a significant challenge. The concept needed time to ripen, and ripen it has.

The late 1990s saw breakthroughs that led to such notable developments as Barnes & Noble, one of the world’s largest book retailers, buying a 49 percent share in an on-demand publisher called iUniverse.com. iUniverse plans to publish about 1,000 out-of-print titles per month at the outset, and customers ought to be able to browse through iUniverse titles in nearly all of B&N’s superstores, eventually to pick up the desired title while shopping in the store. Reliable and affordable on-demand printing is said to be coming within 3 to 5 years.²⁷ Around the same time, Baker & Taylor, a large book wholesaler, struck a deal with Replica Books, now its on-demand print division, to achieve a similar goal.²⁸ Of course, acquiring an older title is not just a matter of going to a library or printing books on demand. The Web also offers services such as Bibliofind, at <http://www.bibliofind.com>, through which one can search a database of more than 10 million used books, simplifying remarkably the process of locating and purchasing an original copy of an older or otherwise hard-to-find book.

Both Barnes & Noble and Baker & Taylor are, in their various partnerships, developing capabilities for publishing the works of new authors. In this type of service, the vendors will make available toolkits and services so that an author may self-publish, at a cost of somewhere between $99 and $500, making his or her own materials available online. Given the