The concept of the humble printed book has remained pretty much unchanged for decades. Now the job of choosing your paperbacks for the beach could be about to get a whole lot more interesting, thanks to print-on-demand technology.

Print-on-demand (POD) technology emerged around 2000 and is used for printing one copy of a book, as and when it's needed.

This technology can be used to make older or obscure titles, which would otherwise be out-of-print, available for sale or to enable users of a website to order a book-version of the site. Here we look at self-publishing via POD, probably the fastest growing use of the technology.

POD is particularly appropriate for self-publishing (publishing without a commercial publisher) because it allows a writer to sell their book directly to their readers via an online bookstore, without the need to invest any money.

Thanks to POD, the once high-brow, impenetratable world of publishing is now open to the masses. Imagine an X-Factor* for writers where anyone has the chance to get their talent, or lack of it, seen by the public and have a shot at the big time.

How does POD work?

To self-publish using POD technology, an author uploads the digital text of their book and self-designed cover art to a POD online bookstore (such as Lulu or iUniverse), for free. The details of the book are listed on the site and when a customer places an order, one copy is printed and sent.

This is very different to the 'traditional' publishing route. Commerical publishers want books with wide appeal that are guaranteed to be worth the investment of printing and dstributing, say, 2000 copies. For this reason most authors find it tough or impossible to find a 'traditional' publisher.

What’s in it for the reader?

It has been claimed that the majority of self-published POD books are badly written. This may be true. Buying from a traditional bookstore offers the guarantee that your book will be professionally written and edited but in the POD world, anyone who fancies themselves as the next Dan Brown can upload 80,000 words of whatever they like.

Imagine a music store with a CD recorded by every one of the hopefuls who try their luck in the early rounds of X Factor*. That is very much how a POD bookstore is because in the world of POD, there is no Simon Cowell to weed out the dross and tell the no-hopers to give up the dream.

So how do you find something worth a read? Many POD sites let you see a preview of the book, which should give you some idea. The blog POD-dy Mouth also aims to help by “wading through the sea of print-on-demand titles and giving you the buried treasure”.

So are these books really that bad?

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*For the American readers, X-Factor is Britain's American Idol