Last month Random House announced it will launch its own POD website. That sentence in and of itself reveals the tumult that has overtaken publishing in the last five or so years. POD was not so long ago a technique used by self-publishing companies and self- published authors as a way of managing costs and inventory while measuring the market's interest in a book or selling to a select audience. Now many conventional publishers regularly use POD as a supplementary or even the only means for publishing a work. In a recent post on "Publishing Frontier" Joe Esposito comments that the real reason behind RH's decision to maintain a POD site may be just to keep control over their intellectual property rights. The new settlement between the book industry and Google means that publishers now maintain rights not for books in or out of copyright but for books in or out of print. Keeping backlist titles or slower selling books in print through POD maintains their status as in print at little risk or cost to the publisher. One additional benefit of having all their books on one website is that multiple listings on a site help create higher rankings in search engines for everything on the site. By pooling the books, RH increases the possibilities for each of the books coming up when particular keywords are entered. In that case, it does not matter if the interested party purchases the book from the publisher or from another source such as Amazon. The important development is that the book popped up and was purchased. And, perhaps more importantly, it remains in print. This rationale can be applied to publishing books with self-publishing companies such as Dorrance or RoseDog as opposed to going it alone as an author. These companies have web sites. They can keep your book in print through e-book publishing or POD. Moreover because they have many books on their sites, the chances of having keywords pertinent to your book come up higher in a search are better than if your book exits only on its own web site. As Joe Esposito has wisely noted, the old paradigm for selling books offline was all about stores, and the new paradigm for selling books online is all about dynamic relationships. That is why and how the web democratizes book publishing. It is relational and not so dependent upon brand recognition or mass advertising and distribution but upon getting the word out and entering into dialog that brings authors and their readers together.