In an economy focusing so heavily on tools to put the power of content creation in the hands of regular every-day people, one area that has been surprisingly underserved is that of book self-publishing.  Up until today, if you wanted to write a book, or make a movie and then have it semi-professionally printed/bound/packaged your only real option was a service called Lulu.com, which let users upload their content, format it, choose bindings and cover art etc and walk away with a very good looking copy of whatever it was you wrote/drew/made.  All for a pretty reasonable fee.  They even could get your work listed on Amazon.com

Well, now there's some competition in the space, and it comes from none other than Amazon itself.  The 300lbs gorilla of the online book selling world has thrown its hat into the ring of user self-publishing with the CreateSpace service.  CreateSpace has two advantages over Lulu currently; price, and guaranteed listing on Amazon.com.  While most Lulu work would get picked up, with CreateSpace, it's part of the service.  You also can get all of those nice extras on your listing such as "Search Inside!" and IMDb listings for DVDs.

I'm always interested in seeing new services like this one as I think traditional media is desperately in need of getting with the times.  Newspapers, and to some extent even books, are having a hard time when competing with the wide-open nature of the Internet.