For those of you interested in the Print-On-Demand (POD) market, which is common in self-publishing, here's an industry press release you might be interested in:

BLOOMINGTON, Ind., Jan. 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Author Solutions, Inc. (ASI), the world leader in the fastest-growing segment of book publishing, announced Thursday the acquisition of Xlibris - a pioneering leader in print-on-demand self-publishing services. Kevin Weiss, ASI president and chief executive officer, made the announcement to Xlibris employees....

Xlibris joins AuthorHouse, iUniverse, Wordclay and Inkubook in ASI's expanding family of self-publishing brands.

You can read the rest of the release here.

Sounds like a consolidating industry. Are authors giving up on POD? Or are the economics not working out as well as was once promised? Or has Amazon muscled out the competition?

For what it's worth, when an author sends me a bio that includes self-published novels, I don't count that as a publishing credit. It shows that the author was focused enough to finish a project -- Lord knows that's uncommon enough -- but not that it was good enough to get someone else to finance. (I don't count it against them, either.) It'll be interesting to see how this market shakes out.