FTER spending a year trying to sell her book to publishers and receiving 70 rejection letters as a reward, Laurie Notaro, a newspaper columnist in Phoenix, decided to do it herself. Working with iUniverse, one of many companies that offer "print on demand" services, Ms. Notaro paid $99 to have her book designed, laid out, stored as a digital file and printed and bound only as copies were ordered. Several months later she sold the rights to her book, plus the concept for a new one, to a major publisher for a six-figure sum.

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Joe Vitale, on the other hand, had already published several business books with traditional publishers. But for a new book, Mr. Vitale, a marketing consultant in Austin, Tex., decided to try a print-on-demand company, 1stBooks Library. For two days in June, Mr. Vitale's book was the best-selling title on Amazon.com.

In the same way that the home computer gave users the ability to create documents that looked good, even if they didn't necessarily read well, print-on-demand services now enable people to publish a book with ease, regardless of whether anyone else would want to read it.

For $99 to $1,600, such companies offer a professionally laid-out book, a choice of stock or customized covers and an International Standard Book Number, or I.S.B.N., which is used to list the book in databases open to traditional and online bookstores.

For those fees, authors also get up to 10 copies of their book, and can buy additional copies, typically for 60 percent of the retail price. With the print-on-demand model, there is no minimum print run; books do not end up stored in a warehouse and possibly destroyed after a few months' run. Yet they never go out of print; the digital file is stored indefinitely, always available for creating another hardback or paperback book when needed.

Some first-time writers believe that if they can get their books in print, they can succeed in the world of publishing. But experiences like Ms. Notaro's and Mr. Vitale's are the exceptions. With up to 100,000 new titles published each year, most books fail to achieve significant sales or produce income for their writers, no matter who the publisher is. And if they are created by a print-on-demand company that sells mainly through the Internet, the chances for success are even smaller.

"Think about how difficult it is to be successful when your book is distributed by a mainstream publisher, multiply that by 10, and that's what you're up against when you go the P.O.D. route," said John Feldcamp, chief executive officer of Xlibris Corp., one of the largest print-on-demand companies.

Yet each year thousands of new authors use the services of a print-on-demand publisher. Some cling to the dream of making it on a best-seller list, while others have more modest goals -printing, say, 50 copies of a family history at a reasonable price to give to relatives.

On-demand books are a new wrinkle in the concept of vanity publishing, in which a vanity press typically prints many copies of the book at once (and generally the author has to pay for them). Since print-on-demand publishers only issue books as needed, costs are lower and the author can even make a little money in royalties.

The boom in on-demand publishing began, like so many other Internet-related businesses, in the mid-1990's, when the rapidly growing World Wide Web seemed as though it might subsume standard retailing. Traditional publishers wanted a piece of the action. Random House and others invested $15 million in Xlibris, while Barnes & Noble bought a 49 percent stake in a competitor, iUniverse. (Barnes & Noble's stake has since been reduced to 20 percent.) "We're serving notice that the rules in publishing have changed," Richard Tam, the founder of iUniverse, was quoted as saying in 1999..

In fact, the rules did not change. Several major print-on-demand companies are now out of business, while others among the several dozen that remain have scaled back their expectations. "Our business model is not obvious yet," Mr. Feldcamp said. "We don't know if publishing on demand will become an effective outlet for alternative publishing, or just a new variety of a vanity press."