Make your book for $7--

The technology around personal book production keeps getting better and better. Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools site offers recommendations on the best online providers of personal books for self-publishers.

As commercial book publishing crashes, personal book publishing is booming. Personal book making entails printing high-quality books in very small quantities, including quantities of one. New technologies permit anyone to print one copy of a softcover or hardcover book, including all-color photo books. These printed-on-demand books are indistinguishable from commercially printed books. In fact, some of the books you buy on Amazon are manufactured with this same technology. You just can't tell the difference.

However, being able to print as few as one copy -- instead of a minimum of a thousand -- shifts the economics of bookmaking toward individuals with more passion than money. For the past two years I've been producing high-quality books in very small quantities using several different services. I've shown these finished books around to many people, including those in the New York publishing industry and media, and everyone has agreed the quality is first class.

He recommends providers such as Lulu and Blurb. I haven't ventured into producing a text-based book yet, but I have produced photo books through Kodak EasyShare Gallery that were very high quality.