Opportunities for Nonprofit Publishing

It's not hard to see how publishing has changed over the last several years.  Magazines becoming ezines.  Readers becomming ereaders.  Monologues, catalogues and travelogues becoming blogs.  

A few of the less ubiquitous innovations have peaked my interest.  Take Kindle, Amazon's highly popular ereader device + publishers marketplace.  Bloggers can syndicate their blog directly to Kindle.  Amazon determines a price to sell your blog content, and you get 30% of the revenue.  There are a lot of nonprofits that publish really unique and valuable information through their websites for free, and may find it valuable to leverage this as an income opportunity.  

Its much easier to publish books these days by simply bypassing the traditional publishing industry layers.  Lulu.com helps you self publish all varieties of books (photo books, novels, calendars, etc) - build these directly online and buy/sell as many or as few as you need.  There are many others including Blurb and Wordclay.

Magazines can also be created on the cheap, by anyone who can produce pdf files.  Magcloud lets you produce a magazine at 20 cents per page plus shipping, and order as few or as many as you want.  I see a lot of great 10 page quarterly publications from nonprofits that are produced traditionally using printers with minimum run requirements that may benefit from more flexibility here.  

Taking a step back, if you just want to share a nicely formatted pdf document widely, Scribd.com can help.  Get a free account and upload your documents - the service makes it very easy to view and share these documents by anyone, to find documents by topic and interest areas, and is a large community of users.