I was having a discussion with my father, and I thought I would bring it up on the mailing list, as it seems to be the place for it. We'd just come out of our local Wal-Mart, and I'd noticed the out-of-copyright books (classics and such) being sold for $6 to $11 each. I commented that folks could just download the books for free if they wanted to read them, but he asked how many people owned a computer, and how many of those had heard of Project Gutenberg? So I did a bit of researching, and discovered that there exist "print on demand" publishers, which instead of doing the offset-printing runs of thousands and thousands of books, will, once a book has been prepared and typeset, sometimes keep none at all in stock, and print them only when ordered. It seems that it would be a good idea to come up with some way to offer the majority of PG's catalog through some method of print-on-demand publishing, selling at-cost. Many Gutenberg works are obscure, and not of general enough interest to warrant a print run from a traditional publisher. I'm aware that I could clearly run off and do this myself, but (a) I wanted to get some feedback from the community at large, and (b) print-on-demand publishing still requires start-up costs, and a per-book "setup" fee of some kind, above and beyond the per-copy materials cost. Given that PG has the Distributed Proofreaders to provide lots and lots of work on worthy projects, and given that PGLAF is a charitable organization which lots of people love, is there some way to get around that issue? Would it be worth it to provide a source of dead-tree editions of many of the archive's works? Thoughts? Objections? Pointers to some guy who's been doing this for the last ten years that I failed to Google up? --grendelkhan