Like many frustrated aspiring novelists, Rosemarie Bishop needed an outlet for her book, Search for a Soul, the story of a vampire's struggle with the human condition. "I had a writing bug -- you really can't control it," says Bishop.

After unsuccessfully shopping her manuscript around, Bishop found a publishing company using "on-demand" printing technology that would publish her book for just $750 -- a far cry from the $5,000 fee that old-fashioned vanity presses usually charge. Her book is now selling on Amazon.com for $18 a copy, and so is its sequel. Bishop gets $4 from each sale, and with total sales at 300 copies, she expects to soon break even.

Using today's digital technology, every author can now have her fifteen minutes on a press. The result is an authentic printed and bound volume, with a glossy paperback cover. Just as copies from the original Gutenberg Press made the written word more accessible to those who could read, digital printing "gives new freedom to people who might have something to say," says Noel Jeffrey, editor of the trade magazine Print on Demand Business.

Unlike e-books, which are delivered as computer files to be read on a screen or a hand-held device, on-demand books are hold-in-the-hand quality paperbacks with real pages and corners that fold. While traditional publishing uses offset presses that only become cost-effective at runs of 1,000 copies or more, on-demand books go directly from computer bits and bytes to digital printers. Machines like the Xerox DocuTech can inexpensively churn out a single volume whenever it is "demanded."

Although the digital technology used to print books has existed since 1991, it didn't take off in the publishing world until the last two years when the two major book distributors -- Ingram Book Group and Baker & Taylor Books - invested in it. Their motivation springs from a glut of books that are yanked from the shelves each month to facilitate rapid turnover. "If you go across the street from my office, there's half a million titles in the warehouse," says Larry Brewster, vice president of Ingram's Nashville-based Lightning Print Inc. With books-on-demand, books are simply -- and cheaply -- stored on computer files, and there's no wasted inventory.

Lightning Print has collected 5,000 digital titles from more than 350 book companies. On their website, librarians are encouraged to fill out a form -- "I want that book!!!!" -- to suggest out-of-print titles that Lightning could pursue. They scored a surge in sales with a distributors' dream -- when Gunter Grass was named the 1999 Nobel Prize in literature, it had 10 digitally-stored books in its system. But a top-seller means 1,000 copies, and Brewster admits that "you need a lot of books" to make one-at-a-time sales profitable. He is aiming for 100,000 titles.

The 8,000-member Author's Guild in New York has arranged on-demand opportunities for members who have obtained the rights to their out-of-print books. But Guild Executive Director Paul Aiken is cautious because current publishing practices call for rights to be reverted to authors after the book is no longer actively distributed -- something that may never happen with on-demand's intrinsic availability.

Others scoff at on-demand publishing altogether. "People don't know what they want, so they can't 'demand' it," says John Baker, editorial director of Publisher's Weekly. And Jonathan Tasini, president of the National Writers Union, says people can publish, but without promotion, who's going to buy? "Technology does not necessarily change the big obstacle of marketing," he says.

The impact of on-demand publishing is extremely preliminary, says Alexandra Owens, director of the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA). "The word 'published' loses its meaning. It's just being printed," she says. But, she adds reluctantly, ASJA does have its own books. "We've considered it," she says, "and we still are considering it."

But major book distributor Baker & Taylor is more optimistic about the future economics of on-demand publishing because of the great demand for out-of-print books. Their Replica Books division pursues re-releases of books in the public domain, such as its Edith Wharton volume, The Fruit of the Tree. "It makes everyone in the industry think differently about publishing," says Susan Frost, Replica's publisher.

Barnes and Noble is also getting into the act. Last year they acquired a 49-percent interest in iUniverse, a books-on-demand publishing services company that prepares files, finds a cover, and arranges copyrighting, ISBN registration numbers, on-demand printing, and distribution through online booksellers.

Investors are counting on tapping another market -- the profusion of writers like Bishop who find the gates of traditional publishing slammed shut. "I think there's an ongoing and everlasting desire on the part of writers to be published and disseminated," says David Hisbrook of Xlibris, another publishing service company.