I passed this along to Ray, and he did some checking.
The short version is: we hope that both of these products will be available again in POD soon.
The issue is that the company which produces POD products for DTRPG has decided to no longer do saddle-stitch (stapled) binding for any product, in favor of perfect (glued/squared) binding. Some products are thick enough to make this transition easily, some less so. Any previously-saddle-stitched products were pulled for sale while they figure out which ones can be done in perfect binding, or which will have problems.
We're on it, but it's really a wait-to-hear mode right now until they figure out what works. The next thinner POD product was intended to be Era Digest: Dark Age, to go alongside TRO Irregulars; that appears to be moving forward.
(And before someone asks: both ED:DA and TRO Irregulars are very close. Ray is waiting to receive proofs to approve, and then we're good to go.)
Time for fun with the purchase database, where a script is run to identify which products are often bought together and bundle those into products that are large enough for PoD.
For example, instead of seven books for the Grey Death story, you might have:
Book 1: Decision at Thunder Rift, Mercenary's Star, Price of Glory
Book 2: Blood of Heroes, Tactics of Duty, Operation Excalibur, The Dying Time
Add some extra details in between the books, so people can easily thumb through it and spot the break points.
This might have to collate data from both the Catalyst store page and the Drivethrurpg page, to make sure as much data is gathered. One request is that any books that are selected for PoD have up-to-date errata taken care of, so people don't purchase the book then immediately have to correct issues in it.
The real fun might be a PoD setup on the Catalyst store page where the customer selects a custom set of books to be printed together as a single book. So one person might want to put all XTRO Primitives books into a single PoD physical item, someone else might prefer to purchase the Davion and Kurita books only because they have a plan for a war and flipping between multiple books won't be fun, a third person might want to put together the Periphery/Pirate/Corporate books, aso.
Each book adds to the page count, and once there are enough pages for a single PoD book the customer is notified. This way a customer might purchase one book that is already big enough for PoD normally, but then add a second book that is too small for PoD, and bundle them together as a single book. There would also likely be another alert so the customer doesn't try to order all the BT books into a single PoD book.
The fun part is how to price this. Off-hand, it would be as follows:
1) Customer purchases PDFs from the Catalyst store as normal, and they are put into that customer's record, so the customer can download them later
2) Customer wants to make a PoD. Customer logs in to their account, and selects the PoD option. Customer then selects which PDFs are to be put into a single PoD. When that PoD is good, the customer adds that PoD to their cart, and can choose to make another PoD. Once all the PoD are set up, the customer makes the purchase. CGL takes a small fee for the file organization and concatenation, then passes along the PDFs, shipping address, and payment for the PoD books to the PoD vendor
So if you as a customer wanted to order some PDFs and get them as PoD it would take two purchases. The first is to buy the PDFs, which adds them to your Catalyst account. The second purchase would be to select the PDFs you want in the PoD books, and purchase those.
I'm not sure how CGL would handle purchases made at non-CGL web sites. Hopefully it would just be a verification/transfer (so if someone purchased the Tactical Operations Book on Drivethrurpg it would be added to their CGL account), but it might not.
