About us
What is it?
Picopress a place to make and manage a single print on demand book or a whole library.
What's all this POD book malarkey? in short its a dream come true, digital book printing with international print centres and global distribution. Book print runs can be as low as one copy and you can print again and again, you only pay when you print. It works by having a PDF copy of your book stored securely with us, when you want a copy of the book printing you send us a web order and we post it to anywhere in the World.
Online/offline distribution your book can be available to all the big online distributors, so your readers can buy from Amazon, Barnes Noble and all the big name distributors. Copies of books are ordered from us by these distributors, the printing cost and distribution fees are deducted from the sales price and we send you a payment for remainder of the sales price. We also broker deals regional book store distributors and your title can be included in international bookstore catalogues.
Personal services
Picopress is run by bibliophiles, if you want bespoke books made then your only going to make us even happier than we are already. If you want a fancy Web e-commerce, back catalogue inventory, XSLT transforms and EDI fulfilment service then the technologists side Picopress's personality going to be doing cartwheels.
Not for much profit
Yes we're a commercial company, yes we want to make some money, but our main reason for being here is to support independent cultural producers. We borrowed the term 'Not for much profit' from Max of Seeds for Change, to describe our approach to creating an economic model of doing business.
How does this translate to our services?
Where we can easily provide semi-automated and standardised services or knowledge sharing facilities we aim to keep the prices as low as possible. We add mark up on printing and distribution fees, between 0-15% depending on the supplier and then modest project and service setup fees. If your are looking for specialised consulting, book production or technology provision, then the fees are much higher and reflect our long experience in print and web technologies fields. Have we made a profit yet? The answers no, but if we did we'd only be blowing it on more technology R 'n' D.
What next
Reducing shipping costs
POD helps book producers reduce their shipping costs by having books printed in different regions around the World, closer to their reader. We are in an ongoing process of finding new POD printers and finding ways to network them together to aid this process.
The language barrier
Once we get our English language systems up and running smoothly we'll be looking to work with partners to provide Picopress like services in a variety of other languages. Currently we are looking at German, Spanish, Dutch and Italian.
The bigger picture
SkyscraperDP part works as a software development and design studio with a series of sister projects to Picopress are MoreIsMore, Web2POD and OmWeb II, but that all complement one another to support independent media.
- MoreIsMore is a Web site for P2P media distribution to events, stores and adhoc venues.
- Web2POD is looking at automated and semi-automated ways to convert Web content into POD books.
- OmWeb II is a sequel to OpenMute's original package of Web publishing tools, providing simple to use Web site creation tools. This time around the tools set would be syndicated to partners, contain a more robust community economic model, better address users need for simplicity and attempt to decentralise content storage and delivery issues.
The projects are collaborations with OpenMute and other partners.
Picopress is owned and operated by Skyscraper Digital Publishing Limited. A company registered in England, company number 03190542. Registered Office: 46 Lexington Street, London, W1F 0LP, Great Britain.
