Trafford Publishing

Trafford Publishing opened its doors in 1995 and accepted its first paying clients - becoming the first company in the world to offer an "on-demand publishing service". People thought we were nuts: Print-on-Demand was an industry term for printing short runs of 300 to 500 books and no one, not even the equipment manufacturers, thought anyone could viably operate a service printing runs of one copy. We proposed to sell the books on the Internet, accepting payment with credit cards, and programmed an elaborate website that would display the books and even take orders. There were very few e-commerce sites at the time, and book industry people quickly dismissed the idea that anyone would ever use the Internet to look for books and scoffed at the idea that people would use credit cards for Internet payments. We loved the challenge of proving them wrong!