A blog of brevity today, as am spending most of my time poring over spreadsheets at the moment, due to imminent appearance of PrintWeek's annual Top 500 survey. Always a fascinating exercise, this year the annotation "gone bust" in my reference file makes what could be a record number of appearances. Oh dear.

Anyway, while reading The Week magazine over the weekend, I noticed in the 'best books' column (this week's selection was the favourite political diaries of former MP Chris Mullin) that two of the titles were described as 'out of print'. Eh? I thought we were in an age where book printing on-demand technology means nothing need ever be out of print again?

Is this a failure on behalf of the publishers involved to maximise the assets in their back catalogues, a failure of the economic model, or a failure of print suppliers to engage with said publishers and make this sort of thing nice and easy for them?

I'd be interested to know.