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I'm sorry to hear about your friend - but having a book out at least makes some of their thoughts immortal.
Speaking as someone who has managed a bookstore and worked for a POD outfit; the biggest problem POD has is that it has no economy of scale.
Ten thousand POD books cost ten thousand times as much to run off as one POD book. The printer may charge you less per, but it's cutting into their profit margin to do it.
Traditional offset printing has massive economies of scale - and that makes a huge difference.
There's also been a huge increase in the quality of POD books over the last few years. Ten years ago they were all trade paperbacks and notably lower quality than what you got from an offset press - now they're good quality books.
I still don't recommend them as a first choice - they're either overpriced in comparison to major publisher books or the author has cut their profit margin down to almost zero - but at least the product is reasonable now.
I recently bought a POD hardcover through LULU (a game rule book) and was pleasantly surprised.
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