Editorial: Camera Obscura - Café Society

A company that normally specialises in personalised T-shirts and mousemats is looking to move into the publishing sector - by letting customers publish their own books. Is this a revolution in the making for the mini-comics crowd?
20 June 2003

At the start of the year, the on-line service CaféPress announced plans to expand the range of products it offers through its website. For those of you who really haven't been paying attention, CaféPress offers users the ability to upload a logo, picture or other design onto their system, and then create a shop on the system, offering that logo printed onto a range of T-shirts, other items of clothing, mugs, mousemats, and other goods.

Setting up an account costs nothing, although the company reserves the right to terminate the account if you don't make at least $25 in a given period. CaféPress charges a base rate for each product sold, but allows shop owners to increase the prices of items sold through their store and keep the difference. The system enables people who can't afford the cost of a whole print run of 100 or more t-shirts up front from a conventional supplier to have them printed on demand.

This does result is slightly higher prices, particularly if the shop owner is trying to make any serious amount of money from the online store, but at the low end, they're not more than a dollar or two more than one might pay in any other internet store, and users can at least be confident of the quality of the merchandise they're getting, and shop owners can get access to a much wider range of products than just T-shirts, if they want.

At the start of the year, CaféPress announced that it was planning two major expansions to its range over the next 12 months. It's rolled out the first already, and now offers shop owners the ability to supply audio or data CDs through their shops.

This is all very well, but what does it have to do with comics?

As you may have guessed, it's the second service that's the really interesting bit. CaféPress will shortly begin offering print-on-demand publishing. When it was announced at the beginning of the year, there were very few details available, but as we get closer to the launch of the service, the company has released slightly more info.

The most interesting part is the bit where the company explicitly trails the service as the means to "Create and Sell You Own Paperbacks and Comic Books", with no set-up fees or pre-printing costs. It's offering a variety of bindings, with full cover colours and black-and-white interiors. It's touting these products as being of retail quality, and given the testimonials I've had from friends about the general quality of CaféPress's other products, I'm fairly optimistic.

I figure this is going to make things pretty interesting for the mini-comics boys, especially the ones who aren't too concerned with making a vast profit off their work.

I know, for instance, that I'd love to be able to point friends of mine to somewhere they could buy easily print copies of Ali Pulling's excellent ODDCASES, or Sean Azzopardi's weird and wonderful GREY SKY anthologies (Yes, I did collaborate with him one on of the pieces in his latest one. Don't let that put you off if you get the chance to pick it up). Or any of the other guys you find a comic conventions, selling, or giving away copies of photocopied mini comics.

And whatever the (physical) quality of their printed product, it's bound to be better than half the minicomics out there. Speaking as someone who has spent plenty of time photocopying, folding and stapling, I can say with some certainty that they cannot produce anything that looks less professional than the job I managed. And If I thought that I could get someone else to produce a low-volume print run, for say, two or three dollars a book, I'd be seriously tempted to think about throwing a couple of hundred quid their way to have something professional looking to sell at conventions. I probably wouldn't look to make a profit doing it, just cover my costs, but I'm sure it'd make people a bit more willing to take a chance on me then my dodgy-looking photocopies would.

While I'm talking about all this, I should at least mention that there was a brief to-do there about CaféPress's revised terms of service (effective from next month), especially with regard to things like trademark and copyright. CaféPress is at pains to point out that no, it does not want all the rights to your material - I'd be surprised if it were in a position to exploit them, to be honest - it just wants the rights to use your material to promote the site and service. That's all their user agreement asks for.

And I'm pretty sure it's not going to stop with CaféPress, either. Right at the other end of the scale, Fortune magazine ran an interview with Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos the other week, in which he talked about a vision of the future where Amazon's range of services extended to allowing consumers to design their own products to buy on-line.

Were this to become a reality, you could quite conceivably own a TPB of any series of comics you own, if Amazon or another company were to provide the means to upload them. Hell, there's no reason publishers couldn't strike a deal with a firm offering this sort of thing to provide access to their back issue archives so that those things they choose not to collect themselves are still available to purchase in some kind of collected form via Amazon.

OK, so the Amazon thing is just my fevered imaginings based on some off-the-cuff remarks by a maverick CEO, but Bezos has been proved pretty good at following through on his bizarre notions in the past, and has met with decent success while doing so. I really don't think it's that incredible a thought.

So there you go. A really fast look at the one of the ways technology is likely to change the face of comics from the point of the consumer. This is, of course, all without examination of it's economic impact, which will probably be considerable as well, and this time in ways that tangibly affect the consumer, rather than the rather distant and abstract effects of things like computer lettering, colouring, and now inking, which might change how our comics look, don't change how we get them.

Alasdair Watson is the author of the Eagle Award-nominated RUST.

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