Sometimes great ideas and trends start with a wave so big, they are hard to ignore. For others they begin almost unnoticed and go by for years, virtually undetected until suddenly they are not only part of our lives, but part of our culture. Back in 1999 I saw an article, a tiny piece in The New York Times about a company called Fat Brain out of Campbell, California. The article talked about their digital publishing, at the time referred to as Print-on-Demand, printing books as they are needed. I was just noodling with the idea of starting my own company back then, an idea which didn’t fully come into being until 2000. But the article intrigued me. If books could be printed one at a time, instead of in lots of several thousand, what could this do for publishing?
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