TechgnosisWeb Prime

Cafepress has gotten a bad rap lately. Mostly from me. We used their services to make some shirts for my old Long Live the Lemur site, and while the shirts were.. acceptable quality, they certainly weren’t worth what they were charging for them. Perhaps their other products are higher quality, and I’ve heard that their shirts have gotten better, but just on the basis of those shirts, I really wouldn’t have reccomended them to anyone unless they really had no other choice. But something’s happened that makes me think that perhaps I’ve been a bit too rough on them. They’re about to introduce a new product that’s not only completely different from the t-shirts and mugs and bags they usually sell, but that has a serious potential to change everything about the publishing business: On-Demand Publishing.

This has a lot of potential. True POD books, with no up-front investment, would lower the barrier to actual publishing immensely. *Any* author could then offer print versions of their work, without having to worry about finding a traditional publisher or paying out of his own pocket for an indie printer to put together a small run of his books to sell. The problem with freedom of the press is that that freedom belongs only to those who own the presses. This would put a press in the hands of everyone (you could say this has allready existed thanks to desktop publishing tools and the internet making easy distribution of e-texts possible, but, there’s just *something* about a book that people love. I’m a huge fan of eBooks, I usually carry 3 or 4 of them on my Zaurus at any given time to read, but I know that a large majority of people simply dont have the cash to spend on an expensive electronic doohickey just to read books, and, moreover, many people have told me that they simply don’t *enjoy* reading on a screen, not a tiny handheld screen, nor even a large computer screen. They want books, paper books.)

However, I do havea couple of concerns. The first one is allready mentioned below: what rights, other than basic publishing rights, does Cafepress get over my work? While personally, I’d likely make any book I published available free online in eBook format as well, and only charge for a dead tree edition (a la Cory Doctorow), keeping the license something along the lines of one of the Creative Commons licenses, I can understand how giving Cafepress the right to use your work in whatever way they want without having to pay royalties would be a serious barrier to many authors who would much rather retain a more traditional copyright scheme.

My second concern is censorship. I looked around, but didn’t find any real guidelines for what they will and will not publish, other than the general guidelines they have for their shirts and the like: no copyrighted logos or images that you don’t have the rights to, etc. etc. But with books the issues gets a little less clear. What type of thought content will they allow to be published, and which not? Would they publish a book critical of the current administration (of the US or any other country)? Would they publish a book dealing with paedophilia, even if it’s only a clinical examination? Would they publish books that deal with subjects that we may not be comfortable with, such as a book from someone sympathetic to ‘enemy’ foreign regimes, books that are critical of famous figures, etc? If I were to publish a book critical of a large company, and that company went to CafePress and told them to stop publishing my book, would they do that? There’s nothing to stop me from making a book like that and printing it out at a local Kinko’s, binding it, and selling it, and I don’t think anyone would hold kinko’s responsible for letting me print out my book, or tell them that they can no longer make copies of my book. Would this CafePress thing be any different?

Just a few thoughts. I have really high hopes for the service, and I think the possibilities for expression are asotunding, but I’d like to have my misgivings addressed before I hand in any of my work to be published in this way.

Ah, wait, from their member agreement:

4.3 You will not use the CafePress.com Service to post content or to design, manufacture, market or sell a Product that (i) infringes the rights of a third party, including, without limitation, copyrights, trademarks, patents, trade secrets, rights of privacy and publicity, (ii) is libelous, defamatory or slanderous, (iii) condones, promotes, contains or links to warez, cracks, hacks or similar utilities or programs, (iv) is sexually suggestive or contains explicitly sexual content (including nudity), (v) does or may denigrate or offend any ethnic, racial, gender, religious or other protected group, through use of language, images, stereotypical depiction or otherwise, (vi) is designed to or does harass, threaten, defame or abuse others, (vii) exploits images or the likeness of minors, (viii) encourages or depicts the use of drugs, alcohol or cigarettes or (ix) is generally offensive or in bad taste.