In article <3c598f68@news.povray.org> , "Mitchell Waite" <mit### [at] dnaicom>
wrote:

> This is a take off on an old idea called "vanity press". These are
> publishers that for fee will publish anything as long as you pay all the
> costs. There is almost no risk for the publisher since they make sure their
> costs are covered by the writer. Its a route people take when they get lots
> of rejections. As far as I know no one has every made any money from a
> vanity publication, and there has never been a best seller in this space.

If it is backed by a big publishing company, i.e. www.bod.com/www.bod.de there
are certain uses:

One is to fulfill the publication availability/delivery requirement of a PhD
thesis (i.e. in Germany one usually needs to submit 25 or so copies of the
thesis and/or get it published, don't know if there is such a requirement in
other countries).

Or a way to make manuals or out-of-print titles available without having any
administrative overhead.  One example in the USA is Apple, which uses a
similar (commercial only) service to make rarely requested developer
documentation available to a much more affordable price compared to what it
did cost before, when most of it was published through Addison Wesley.

    Thorsten

____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

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