Said Hewlett-Packard's Andrew Bolwell in a recent ABC World News feature on the book,"We think a book like this that's printed only after it's ordered, that's personalized for the end user, is absolutely the future of publishing. You can have your own family cookbook with Grandma's recipe through to Martha Stewart's recipe."

It appears that unbeknown to Bolwell, the future (much like President Obama) has already arrived. RWW has already covered a number of companies where products are produced on an individual basis and personalized to the user. Below is a list of companies that allow users to upload, price and purchase their personalized books:

1. Blurb: Blurb offers users the chance to personalize books in a variety of formats. The quality of this product is extremely striking and buyers can opt for a number of page layouts and finishes. The company is one of the few businesses able to earn healthy revenue in our down economy.

2. Lulu: Similar to Blurb, Lulu also allows customers to personalize and create books. Users can upload photos from their Facebook, Flickr and Photobucket accounts as well as directly from their computers. The finished products are sold in the Lulu online storefront as eBooks or physical hard covers. The company even offers square, compact and wallet sized options.

3. CreateSpace: In late 2007, Amazon launched CreateSpace as an on-demand book publishing service. In addition to being able to create a personalized book and sell it in the Amazon storefront, users can also create Kindle-specific books, audio CDs, MP3s, DVD's and video downloads. While the service isn't as sleek as Lulu or Blurb, the potential to reach the Amazon audience is a huge draw to those looking to earn money with their creative talents.

4. Scribd: Another site with a large audience, Scribd recently launched their own store this past April. With 60 million unique visitors per month, the company is a great platform for those looking to publish their original works. Budding authors can price and publish their books alongside Simon and Schuster titles in the Scribd storefront. For now, the storefront only services the eBook audience.

5. Tastebook: Both Grandma and Martha Stewart's recipes can live side-by-side in this personalized cookbook making site. Featured in a RWW article on recipe resources, this tool offers users the chance to personalize cookbooks and produce them on an individual basis.

The Obama Time Capsule is obviously a very cool project, but it's clear to see that personalized book production is certainly not a new concept. That being said, regardless of whether or not it's a paradigm shifter for publishing, the quality of The Obama Time Capsule, coupled with Smolan's recognition as a TIME photographer and TED speaker will likely still draw fans.

UPDATE: It turns out Obama's Time Capsule IS actually made possible by Blurb's global print partner network, a partnership which exclusively uses the HP Indigo digital printing presses. Other partners include Google, Facebook, AOL, Glam Media and paper manufacturer NewPage.

The Scirbd store itself just launched last month. About 5,000 Simon & Schuster titles will be available through the Scribd store. Those titles will then be readable on Scribd.com, computer desktops, and various mobile devices. Simon & Schuster will also make thousands of printed titles available for preview with links to purchase from other outlets.

The Simon & Schuster content also will be available through the storefront and will be discoverable by browsing Scribd's categories such as "books" and "business." The publishing house will also be able to take advantage of social recommendations made through Scribd's social features, which include Twitter and Facebook integration.

"With millions of visitors and an extraordinary number of posted documents, Scribd has become an important destination for readers seeking written information that is relevant to their lives," said Ellie Hirschhorn, Executive Vice President and Chief Digital Officer of Simon & Schuster. "We're pleased to offer them this convenient, user-friendly option for discovering, sampling, and purchasing Simon & Schuster books, any time and anywhere."

Scribd's Copyright Management System, which will apply to Simon & Schuster eBooks as it does to all other items in the Scribd store, will help to prevent the upload of unauthorized written works. Publishers have the ability to determine how works are read, including settings for "read only on Scribd.com," "download," and "download with DRM." Scribd also allows publishers to experiment with pricing, which can be changed easily and at any time.

Beginning this month on the self-publishing site lulu.com, you will soon find a broad selection of some of the site's most popular free content made available via the iPaper format. There will be numerous titles offered from a variety of genres including cookbooks, biographies, photo books, books about computers and Internet, and books about arts and photography. And thanks to iPaper's ability to embed AdSense ads within the documents, content creators will now have a way to offer free e-books that also have the potential to earn them an income.

Over the next three months, Lulu will test the use of Scribd's iPaper on their site, and, if all goes well, they will then explore rolling out iPaper to include more of their site's content.

Net Applications has been tracking the uptake of Firefox 3 since yesterday morning, and it is now at around 4.5% -- not bad for its first 24 hours. Firefox on the whole is closing in on 20% market share and is higher among tech savvy crowds (over 50% on this blog, for example). That 4.5% of Firefox web browser users are already using version 3 indicates that about 25% of its user base has upgraded overnight -- that's very impressive.

If you're still on the fence about upgrading, check out the pair of great overviews of FF3 from Lifehacker here and here.

Are you using Firefox 3? Do you plan to upgrade? Let us know in the comments and vote in our poll below.

Some back of the napkin math by noted rails developer Evan Weaver (who recently went to work for Twitter), finds that while Twitter might be huge in terms of monthly pageviews, the Facebook app Friends for Sale, may still be bigger. And Yellopages and Scribd are similarly massive.

Ignoring the oddities in Weaver's computation (like, for example, that even though he works at Twitter he only guesses how much traffic the API is fielding), which he admits result in "wildly inaccurate values," he makes one very good final point: It doesn't matter!

"It is important to keep in mind how useless this information is. It doesn't even make sense to say 'Rails site' or 'PHP site,'" says Weaver. "Livejournal uses Perl, Memcached, and MySQL, among other things. Does that make it a Perl site, a MySQL site, or a C site? I don't know what Scribd uses, but it's pretty likely that their document pre-renderer is Java or C, not Ruby. Friends for Sale uses Nginx, Rails, Memcached, MySQL, and Linux. Ruby is really just a little piece of the pie."

Firstly Compete's data shows that Slideshare has been ramping up:

I have to note though that Scribd, which allows you to upload any type of document (not just presentations), is also ramping up according to Compete. The following chart shows that Scribd is far more popular than Slideshare:

Nevertheless there's no doubt that Slideshare is growing. I would guess that it is the leading pure play online presentations app - but please leave a comment if you think otherwise.

What impresses me about Slideshare is that it has a thriving community. I uploaded my Media08 presentation, Web Technology Trends for 2008 and Beyond, to Slideshare (link) a couple of weeks ago and within days it had thousands of views and some comments. As of today it has been favorited 49 times and embedded (in other blogs etc) 67 times. I also noticed many people friending me via Slideshare. This tells me the community at Slideshare is vibrant and they enjoy viewing and discussing slideshows.

Slideshare has some neat features: tags, ability to post to various sites such as Facebook and Blogger.com, good privacy options, transcription of the slideshows, widgets, and more.

The Groups feature is something that could be utilised by a lot of people. For example the XMediaLab group nicely rounds up all of the presentations from the recent Media08 event that I presented at. So if you weren't in Sydney to attend that event, you can at least browse through all of the presentations (and if new media is your thing, it's well worth your time!).

Individuals can also make use of Slideshare to store all of their public presentations - check out Dave McClure's large collection for example.

If you needed any more proof that Slideshare rocks, they also have an API - check out SlideShare Karaoke, which ProgrammeableWeb describes as "a PowerPoint mixer to select a PowerPoint presentation on the fly from SlideShare".

Slideshare isn't perfect, e.g. it currently doesn't convert from Mac Keynote. It may not even have the biggest store of online slideshows - Google, Zoho, Scribd are just a few competitors that potentially have more. Also let's not forget (as I almost did!) that Slideshare is a slideshow sharing app, not a creation one like many of the others. But even given all of that, Slideshare looks to have tipped amongst the hip web 2.0 crowd; and more importantly it has built up its own community of presentation-lovers.

What app(s) do you use for online presentations?

iPaper has been designed to be a new web-based document viewer that is "more like a YouTube video than it is like a PDF." Says Trip Adler, Scribd co-founder and CEO, "Documents formats like PDF and Doc were designed before the Web was as pervasive as it is today...In 2008, everything is online and most documents are created to be shared in some way over the Internet. We designed iPaper as an online standard that brings the best of existing formats straight into the browser."

The iPaper application, at only 100 KB, is 1/1000th the size of Adobe Acrobat Reader. The application supports Scribd's social features like emailing and embedding as well as a security system that allows content owners to protect their work without the use of DRM. Like PDFs, iPaper supports full text search, copy and paste, as well as zooming and various view modes.

iPaper Screenshot

Since the iPaper doesn't launch in a separate window, visitors stay on your web site. The format also offers some unique search engine optimization (SEO) features to increase the amount of traffic from Google and other search engines.

Beyond PDFs

However, iPaper isn't just a new way to view PDFs in a web browser. In addition to PDFs, the new format supports Microsoft Office documents, including Microsoft Word (.doc), Microsoft Excel (.xls), and Microsoft Powerpoint files (.ppt, .pps). Other supported files types are text (.txt), Adobe PostScript (.ps), OpenOffice Text Documents (.odt, .sxw), OpenOffice Presentations (.odp, .sxi), OpenOffice Spreadsheets (.ods, .sxc), OpenDocument formats, Rich Text (.rtf), JPEG images (.jpg, .jpeg), Portable Network Graphics (.png), and Graphic Image Format files (.gif).

Monetized Content

iPaper also allows content publishers to make money from their documents by the inclusion of contextually relevant ads. This optional feature uses ads that are powered by Google AdSense, making iPaper the first application to display AdSense in Flash. Unlike Adobe and Yahoo's recent move to put ads in PDFs, iPaper users don't need to have the latest version of Reader to see the ads - if the PDF is in iPaper format, the ads are there.

You can see an example of an iPaper with ads here.

Scribd Platform

Where Scribd.com allows anyone to publish to iPaper on the internet, the Scribd platform allows for the use of the iPaper format either internally or externally. There is an Scribd API for developers to use or non-programmers can use the provided embed code or take advantage of Scribd's new QuickSwitch tool.

The QuickSwitch tool lets anyone insert one line of code into a web page to convert every PDF on the site into an iPaper. To use QuickSwitch, you only need access to modify your HTML source code and a Scribd API account. You can then choose how the documents should be displayed: as fullscreen iPaper hosted on Scribd, as Scribd document page links, as embedded iPapers on the web page, or as a custom page with an embedded iPaper hosted on your site. Alternately, a Single Link Mode is available to allow Advanced Users to only convert a single document on the site into an iPaper.

Getting Started

If you already have a Scribd account, you can get started here, by signing in with your username and password. If you don't have a username and password, you can also sign up on that page for a Scribd API account.