Printing Made Easier

I've always admired www-archive as a simple SMTP to HTTP service, but
I wonder if there ought to be a similar thing for works whose intended
output is the printed form. In other words, a www-archive of print.

There have often been times when I've wanted a work printed without
having to go through the hassle of even so much as self-publishing,
let alone sending to a journal for peer review, or publisher for sale.
There are two main benefits to having something in print:

1. The output version is a fixed snapshot that can be referred to
unambiguously. Online, you have to cite a work as "accessed on $date",
which the Web Archive may not have a counterpart for.
2. Printed versions of things have lasted thousands of years; we are
not sure how well digital information will be preserved. Moreover, a
www-archive of print could have an online counterpart to, to
facilitate access and cover all the archival bases.

The reason why www-archive works is that you must know about it
socially, and the W3C has a challenge-response spam filter. I'm not
sure what the print-archive counterpart to this barrier for entry
idiom would be, but perhaps something along the lines of requiring
TeX; or some format, or some kind of style-guide, at least. But not
too severe!

This still leaves big important questions. Who would organise such a
thing? Who would print it? Who would buy it?

Do you know of any such efforts that already exist? I have considered
arXiv, but Wikipedia [1] leads me to conclude that its "endorsement"
system is too high a barrier for entry, and anyway, it's an archive
for academic papers, whereas I would like print-archive to be able to
house poetry and so on.

Otherwise, how can this be made to happen, if it be a good idea?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=ArXiv&oldid=179255420#Peer-review

-- 
Sean B. Palmer, http://inamidst.com/sbp/

Received on Monday, 4 February 2008 16:06:16 UTC