A long-standing problem on my Ancient Buddhist Texts webiste has been that most of my readership is in the States and Europe, but most of my books are published in Malaysia or Singapore, and it is simply cost-prohibitive to get books sent out from here, so many of my readers never have a chance to receive printed copies of the books.
To overcome this problem I have just spent the past couple of weeks remaking all the pdfs in the English section of the website in order to improve the front covers and add in back covers so that they can be sent to a print-on-demand service that is now being made available from the site.
The service itself is provided by Peecho, an award-winning company based in the Netherlands, but integrated with printers worldwide to provide print-outs of books as they are required, rather than printing in bulk in expectation of sales.
It is already possible to download any of the pdfs from the site yourself and print them out, of course, but if you want it printed and bound professionally and sent to you, you can now click on a Peecho button, choose the options required and give a mailing address. The book is printed within a few days and sent to you.
At the moment I am only making the service available on the English section of the site.1 If it proves to be popular enough to make it worth my while then I will start adding in other titles, like the chanting books in the Texts and Translations series.
The main idea behind the service is that independent writers can offer their works online, have them printed out and make a small profit on it. But it is also possible to forgo any profit, which is the case here, of course. So no monies come to me, or to the website in any way. From my point of view this is simply a way of making the material more widely available.
If anyone reading this uses the service I would very much appreciate feedback, letting me know how quick the service is, the quality of the printing, etc. which I obviously am unable to control, but would very much like to know.
Here is a button for you to try out. It links to my translation of the Long Discourse on the Ways of Attending to Mindfulness, a 96 page translation of one of the main Canonical meditation discourses:
As I remade the covers for the pdfs, that required remaking the covers for the epub and mobi versions of the text, so those have also been updated now, and are available from the index pages of the work concerned or from the E-Books page on the site.