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author is likely going to hire a freelance copy editor to add polish to the work, and maybe a graphics artist to design a professional looking dust cover. The Internet, has provided a new worldwide distribution channel for a work once published. An author can promote and sell their book through their own web site, through Amazon.com, or some other on-line vendor. In fact, in today's world, many books are sold in soft copy digital format eliminating hard copy printing altogether. An author also has the option to sell their book through traditional book stores too.

In the past five years or so, self-publishing has become a phenomenon, actually threatening to erode traditional publishing markets. The reason is a capability known as on demand publishing, facilitated by digital printing presses.

The printing press has evolved greatly since Gutenberg's day, the state of the art today being a method known as offset lithography. In an offset lithographic press, a photographic negative of the document(s) to be printed is produced and then used to photographically transfer the image onto a lithographic plate. A developer is used to remove portions of the plate where ink is to be transferred to the paper. A single plate can hold about 32 pages of a typical 6X9 book, so quite a few plates must be made to produce a single book. The plates must be manually installed and aligned in the press before printing can start. It is a labor intensive process, and as such, involves substantial cost. Also, your not going to set up an offset press, to print less than five hundred or a thousand copies of a book at a time. Most small book runs are 3-5000 books. Enter xerographic technology.

Xerographic printing has actually been around since the 1960's, but in 1993, printing presses designed to use the technology to print books and other traditional document formats, came into being. Xerographic printers and copiers use an electronically controlled laser beam to discharge areas of a photovoltaic material on a print drum. The drum is then exposed to a very fine charged plastic powder called toner that is also electrically charged. As a result of the difference in electrical potentials between the toner and spots on the drum discharged by the laser, the toner clings to the drum and is transferred to paper rolled against it. Finally, the paper now containing the printed image in powdered toner ink form, passes over a fuser, which heats the toner causing it to melt and permanently adhere to

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