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Well, there are pros and cons to print-on-demand. The big downside is that it still involves printing and storing physical inventory. In contrast, with South of the Sun as a PDF here, it's now online -- and it can be available for sale forever, in essence, and maintaining that availability costs us nothing, now that I've gone to the effort of making the PDF. So if someone wants it this month, great; if someone wants it five years from now, it will be there waiting for them to plunk down their money. Even if a POD service allows us to print just 25 copies, that might be 20 or 24 more than I really need in reasonable time frame. Those books occupy shelf space in the warehouse, they have to be tracked and inventoried, they bloat the number of SKUs in the line and make it harder for retailers to maintain "full line" stocking of the product line. The one print on demand experiment I'm interested in trying is the Ars Magica Classic Reprints idea -- where we do POD versions of out of print books from the White Wolf and Lion Rampant era. In the case of these books, we do not have digital files. This means that it's actually easier to do a POD than a PDF (because a lot of POD vendors will digitize a physical book for you). So what we could do is do a one-time short run (using POD technology, but not strictly print-on-demand since we would not be planning to maintain availability...it would be more of a limited edition reprint), making exactly enough to satisfy pre-orders. Another thing to remember is that there ARE plenty of physical copies of our out of print books out in the marketplace. I know our local game store still has copies of South of the Sun, for example. I feel that PDF does not so much step on the toes of the retailers and the secondary market, where some scarcity of the printed item may be helpful for those merchants' ability to sell things. (Heck, the PDFs probably help sell out of print titles, by alerting collectors to their existence.)
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