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1] POD station: Mute have some smaller printers who act more informally around London and have good relations with them, Simon from Mute has also been working with RIT Rochester Institute of Technology, who have made a system or are developing it, that can go straight from the web into a book form or newspaper and is for making instant newspapers and books.
http://drupal.org/project/innovationnewsprofile
He's actively working with the system and looking how you can do booksprints or fast productions. and say this would be a really good system to use for a collaborative writing and instant POD production.
POD with Mute as designed/proofed fro print process = 3 weeks
Set up costs £165-200
Book costs approx £1.80 ea.
UPDATE DEC. 09
after meeting w. Simon 17.12.09 simon@metamute.org
General limitations:
i] portrait [landscape many more problems]
ii] size smaller better. eg. 152 x229 [called Royal or Octava]
iii] paper type - standard bookwove 80gms
simpler if no images
cover [+ image if req.], contents/preface end papers all best predesigned if 24hr turnaround required.
options:
a] simplest - prestyled [eg. code/text/prompt] to dump to standard dtp
b] 'single source production' - 1 set of data not tied to any particular output platform - XSLT = xml transform, which is a pretty wel mapped route but can be time consuming
Also possibility to do multiple revisions of book over the week [ie. multiple versions outputted]
UPDATE JAN. 10
I can suggest two approaches to a quick fix for converting text content into a POD book, of course there are many ways to do this that I'm not mentioning here, the ultimate of which is the 'single source publishing' using XSLT transforms. (see attachment BELOW)
Adam Hyde of FLOSS manuals sent me a Pyton script that converts a XHTML document into a Scribus FLOSS DTP document, but ill have to do some digging around to find this. It was from Ludmilla Media Centre in Ljubljana.
The Python script still involved the text be outputed from your system as a XHTML document. So in that can I'd suggest an even simpler route to making that into a book would be the Page2PUB Firefox plugin from Open Publishing Lab from RIT.
This second option of the Page2Pub is a little bit of a hack, crude, approach, but whats interesting is that it makes an Epub doc as well and all your system would have to do is generate styled web pages.
Here is there plugin.
If the Page2pub option was acceptable I'd think it would be interesting to explore as again its open source and the RIT people are really interesting and helpful.
Quickly convert wiki content to EPUB and print-ready pdf books with the beta of
HTTP: opl.rit.edu/project/page2pub
All best and ill hunt down that python script
web2pod_planning_design_v0.1.doc
Cover
1. test_cover.pdf
2. 
3. diagramH
