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Examining the Era of Print-on-Demand
tonywong writes "Printing on demand is getting cheaper and better every year. The New York Times has this a review of sites that offer simple DTP programs for free to lure potential publishers. The article claims that the print run can be as little as a single copy on demand." From the article: "Blurb.com's design software, which is still in beta testing, comes with a number of templates for different genres like cookbooks, photo collections and poetry books. Once one is chosen, it automatically lays out the page and lets the designer fill in the photographs and text by cutting and pasting. If the designer wants to tweak some details of the template -- say, the position of a page number or a background color -- the changes affect all the pages. The software is markedly easier to use -- although less capable -- than InDesign from Adobe or Quark XPress, professional publishing packages that cost around $700. It is also free because Blurb expects to make money from printing the book."
This seems very interesting. It would be nice if they would accept existing formats as well as whatever is generated from their application. But I like the idea of printing low-volume books becoming cheaper.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
i dunno, being an old timer zine publisher (since '87) i still kinda sorta miss the days of the gluestick, typewriter and a trip to the kinkos (well, the one where you had a friend who worked the grave yard shift and let you copy your zine for free).
but alas, i must admit that programs like quark (and now indesign) have made things a bit easier... and well, the whole on-demand publishing like lulu (and others) have made the DIY publishing cheaper but also opened up "underground" press (aka small-press) to new audiences.
i mean, there was only so much you could do with your by-hand copied zine... sure passing them out at the shows and begging the local record store owners to carry them was great... but this on demand thing is, well... not only do you get the control (creative) but you also can actually (sorta) compete with the "big boys."
sad robot making broken music
Any professional writer will look at this and say, POD and vanity press stuff does not count as being published. And they will be right. Just because you can gather the scratch needed to print something does not mean you will find yourself on Oprah's book club. It's still all about distribution and marketing.
Now when someone writes software that will query agents and automatically keep track of responses and requirements for different publishing houses, I'll be interested.
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
Printing on demand is getting cheaper and better
There was a German transcription for DTP - "Dumme Treiben Plötsinn" (along the lines of "Dumbheads Try Printing"). So it is more likely that language and readability of printed matter will decline/degrade even more. But that does not matter, cause technical quality (10^y dpi, full colour) will be state-of-the-art.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
I played around with Lulu.com's print-on-demand service a few months ago; it was surprisingly easy. I layed out the book in OpenOffice, saved it to a PDF, checked it in xpdf, and sent the file to them. A week or so later, I had a hard copy with a professional-looking cover and everything. One thing to note before ordering from them: Lulu's 6" x 9" format is actually larger than most paperback books; if you want yours to look "normal," don't use it. Anyway, overall it was a fairly positive experience; I'd recommend them for low-volume book printing.
The software may be good, but output is still another matter. Print has been making great strides in resolution, but laser copy has a tendency to stick to vinyl binders and inkjet runs when wetted.
i'd like a tiny little 4 colour offset press, please.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...this doesn't worry me. In the slightest.
Just like home DVD templates, and all sorts of stuff like that, it'll be great for Billy and Sunshine to print the grandparents a copy of "Baby's First Shit".
See, the thing that software like this can't compensate for is people who can't recognize and don't understand what makes a project work. What makes it readable. What makes it attractive against all the other competition sitting on the shelf at Borders (or Amazon for that matter).
We're talking about near-subliminal things that create an impression of quality and expertise. Sure, time can be put in creating an amazing template that has some of these qualities, but then what do you have? A bunch of projects that look the same, and lack any soul of their own. Look at most of the template-built blogs out there. Boring.
I've done 4 books this year so far, and I average 8-9/year, so I feel comfortable evaluating this.
m-
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
This article is only about the progress of the MEDIUM, not about the progress of human thought or some kind of intellectual literary breakthrough. The hardest part about making a good book is coming up with compelling content. Any monkey can press keys on the keyboard now and click "Print". In fact many household pets and human babies have been known to jump on their parent's keyboards and accidentally print out gibberish. The key to making something worthwhile to read is having interesting subject matter. I don't care if it is written in 3D-Holographic-Magic-Time-Shifting-Newsprint-from- the-24th-century, if it is written poorly, then nobody will care or remember. I would rather read something written on delicate parchment, or something scribbled in the margins of a notebook in Crayola, if the IDEA contained in those scribbles is unique, amazing, and earth-shattering. For example, suppose somebody urinated in the snow, the equations for faster-than-light-speed travel. Even though the medium that the message is communicated in, is utter garbage, the message itself is divine and priceless.
LOL! MY POST IS SWEET!
It would seem to me that the reason DIY book making could be getting cheaper is better printers. The easier and faster it is to print something the cheaper and more flexible you become for DIY books.
The article is severly lacking in juicy technical details but if you had a printer that would not only print the pages but bind it and put a dust jacket on it then the difference between printing 10,000 different books and 10,000 copies of one book is zero.
That's my hunch. The easier and faster printers become to do this sort of thing, the cheaper DIY printing will become. Anyone with actual technical knowledge about the printers behind the scenes care to chime in?
Would this not be the step beyond assembly line production? You can completely customize the output without sacrificing the ability to make duplicates. Next step: rapid prototyping of 3-D objects done in similar high-volume custom jobs.
:wq
Would this not be the perfect application for a LaTex?
When we wanted to write something, we had to do it all by hand. All we had to write on was a good old-fashioned hillside and our trusty hammer to write it with.
No sirree, none of these childish "publishing packages" for us. We used to trudge up in the hills all day long to find a good spot to scribble on, and we loved it!
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
I've been printing on demand since I owned my first printer. When I demand something printed, I hit the print icon (or the command print file.txt for the DOS fans).
Since you can get a hardcover bound copy of your book this way for less than $40 a copy, this would be great for something like wedding pictures; you could print a few copies for parents and wedding party members without spending all the money you got as wedding gifts.
Have you read my blog lately?
As a student photographer I was planning on throwing a bunch of photos together and printing it via apple and iphoto. i looked into it and read some bad reviews of apple's printing methods so i decided to look more into the subject of print on demand. I looked at a ton of options and decided to go with LuLu. I layed out the book myself and uploaded it. Their site gave me a few problems with the formatting but a post to lulu's forums had that solved within a matter of minutes. So after printing a few copies I decided to make it a legit book and acquired an ISBN number for it right through lulu. It's now sold via their website, my website, a few independent bookstores, art galleries, and very soon, Borders and amazon.com. So as a result of using lulu (or any print on demand service) my photos are being seen all over the globe. Print on demand is revolutionizing more than just the literary world.
And the quality of the material. Writers -- especially fiction writers -- who self-publish do so because they can't get their work published anywhere else. And it shows; I've read more than enough overly-long descriptions of how beautiful/sexy/handsome/perfect the masturbatory protagonist is in the first paragraph of POD books to know there's a lot of dross out there.
And even the rare gem that gets through usually needs the guiding hand of a vicious editor. ("No, no, no! You will not describe her eyes as "obsidian orbs," no matter how cool you think that sounds!")
Blurb isn't for people like slashdot readers, trust me. You can get beter quality for less at Qoop, Lulu or even by going to the book printers directly.... But only if you know how to make a PDF, which is beyond the scope of most people... thus the 100% blurb markup.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
It's all about the benjamins. Publishers have access to the distribution channels > distribution channels charge money to be there > retailer charges money to be on their shelf. Period.
If I had millions to throw at a POS book about some topic, I could get distribution everywhere.
Pompous ass.
Got Trader Joe's? friendwich.com RSS feeds work now!
it just amazes me that the profile of lulu is still so low. vanity press companies have existed for years- squeezing big bucks out of want to be authors. look at how much money gets dumped into the 'be a succesful author' business. along comes lulu and practically drops every economic barrier to entry.
you don't have to worry any more about getting ripped off. write your great american novel, put together your great coffee table book, whatever you want-- and put it out there. lulu keeps on going but i really thought by now it would be much bigger than it is.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I've said it time and again: Your best idea, magnificently executed is the smallest part of a successful product.
It's easy to do a great print-on-demand title (shameless book plug...), and Lulu does a great job of producing the books, guiding you through getting you in the distribution chain.
But then you have to market, market, market. The books, calendars, etc. that sell best are those that:
Other than that, it's a long slow slog to make a buck.
Maybe try posting on Slashdot to get some attention!
copy editing services in this niche of the industry? My wife is a retired editor and could do that sort of thing as a service very easily.
I think this is a great alternative to the old vanity presses.
"Do the Right Thing. It will gratify some people and astound the rest." - Mark Twain
It's all about the benjamins. Publishers have access to the distribution channels > distribution channels charge money to be there > retailer charges money to be on their shelf. Period.
Distributors charge money to be there, eh? That's funny, although I've been in the business for 15 years, I've never experienced that. They want discounts to beef up their profit margins, but what else is new.
It takes a relatively modest investment to get something printed, and getting distribution is a lot easier than it used to be, thanks to Amazon and its ilk. if you actually have something useful and original that people actually want, you'll do just fine, money or not. Time is another matter. Marketing and promotion are extremely time consuming.
Pompous ass.
Mmmmmk. Whatever. Don't blame the rest of the world if you aren't willing to work hard enough to be successful.
m-
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
Want to have a serious barrier to copying your electronic text files? Make people buy them on paper.
To err is human. To forgive is good system design.
One potentially useful application for print-on-demand is the publishing and distribution of textbooks. The costs of dealing with extra unused books are eliminated, and customers no longer have to wait two weeks at the beginning of the semester for their semi-out-of-print book to arrive at the bookstore.
But will this mean a significant decrease in already overpriced college textbooks? Not a chance.
I work for a printing company and we offer POD services for coppanies that might need to have distrubuters or customers have branded and personalized matierals. You can see a demo of what is about at http://www.tavawava.com/demo/
Sometime the economics suck.
Some books have a limited market, so even if the writing is at the professional level, the size of the market means the books end up being obscenely expensive, like that 4th year textbook for Mathematics majors specializing in Pure Mathematics end up with a $200 textbook (300 pages hardcover only) because the only decent alternative has been out of print for the past ten years.
I'd like to live in a world where I could click on anything in a publisher's backlist and get it printed and shipped to me.
In such a world, we could try to pass legislation under which refusing to sell a book on a POD basis meant forfeiting the copyright.
In today's world things like "Lord of Light" and the Lensman series have gone out of print, and that is just plain wrong.
Writer Beware's blog linked recently to "Opening paragraphs of recent PODs that yielded an abbreviated read".
...all this makes me wonder why there's no Emergency Editor Squad (operating under the Language Police). =)
I wonder if the publishers can offer customers the chance to customize their books. Get a custom imprint on the first page, order special high-gloss paper, oversize coffee table prints, pocket-sized travel editions, leather binding, gilt edges. That way you could get a sturdy copy for yourself, a run of paperbacks for the class you teach, and a special leather-bound set for Christmas presents, each with a special inscription, and a special hand-cut vellum edition for your grandparents' fiftieth anniversary.
This is not my sandwich.
Faster ways to format material for printing eliminates one bottleneck in the publishing process; easy production of small numbers of physical books eliminates another. What I don't often hear is what sort of publishing book creators actually want to accomplish. I can see these services being very handy for specific kinds of publishing and distribution projects, like your church or organization assembling a cookbook for fund-raising drives or printing a small set of instruction books for your proprietary software. But what does this have to do with the kind of publishing services offered by the big houses: editing, marketing, distribution, etc.? Will the next Da Vinci Code or Tom Clancy thriller be POD? I doubt it. I do see the economies of initial production getting a little cheaper, which might make big publishing houses a tad more willing to try out new authors, but their entire business model is based on shooting for blockbusters. The questions that need to be asked include: How will you get anybody to order your book? Who will edit it and advise you and how to enhance it? (It was said that Theodore Drieser delivered his manuscripts to the editor in a truck, and the editor returned them in a taxicab.) Who will vet the book for libel or accuracy? These are some of the things that reputable publishers currently provide. These programs, as clever as they might be, won't.
It would be good if LaTeX 3 ever got released, but the mailing list is silent and the website suggests nobody has done any signifcant development in years. If LaTeX 3 progress remains dead, I'd say fork the development tree as it stands and produce a variant with the features desirable in modern desktop publishing. Nothing to stop anyone, and LaTeX 2e came about precisely because people thought the original version 2 was crap and went on to make their own derivatives.
I doubt, for example, any DTP software out there has meaningful support for high-contrast colour formats such as OpenEXR or JPEG2000. Printers are probably not up to it yet, but who is going to add on a complex feature nobody can use? The software is much easier to change, so it is much easier to create the demand first.
(In fact, LaTeX' bitmap support is truly pathetic. True, LaTeX is designed to be totally scalable, which means vetors are always preferable, but there are many illustrations that simply can't be done that way.)
LaTeX' handling of subsections is also very poor and works in absolutes rather than relatives. Sure, not many people want to nest more than, oh, three or four deep. But plenty of technical texts can nest much deeper than that, and LaTeX has no provision for it, because of the way you have to name the specific depth you're working in. (This also makes it much harder to develop things section by section, as you have to be very cunning to make something viewable at an arbritary depth.)
Finally, you've got to process your fonts to work at a specific DPI, at the time of display or printing. "But won't I know this?" Only if you're using a pixel-based printer. What happens when someone produces a laser printer that can handle vectors as well as pixels? What's the DPI of a vector, if the laser has two degrees of freedom and can control both motors simultaneously? For that matter, what if I want to output to a plotter, where I already have this capability? Vector monitors aren't in widespread use any more, but they do exist. If the software is designed to work with such methods, shouldn't it be outputtable to such devices?
(LaTeX editors exist now, which was my big grudge for a long time, although they're nowhere near the point of, say, Ventura Publisher. Yet, anyway. This, despite the fact that TeX is already a very powerful engine.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Easier, cheaper, and a lot faster than trying to find it in used/collectible, and in general, the only way any record company will ever make money off their content "in the vaults".
Of course, since this is rational, it isn't going to get done until consumer electronics companies start buying up major labels and look at their content as a way to make money instead of something to "stop pirates from getting into".
Then, there's film/video. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to get a DVD burned of ... anything?
There should be no such thing as "backlist - not available" in an age where all usable content regardless of media type is digital.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Oh my god... I laughed, I cried. Mostly, I cried.
Any online publication service will be happy to sell editing and proofing services to you at extra charge, or line up your own.
If you want to buy marketing services, google.
With respect to marketing as provided by publishers, it's my understanding based on what experienced professionals have said (I have plenty of experience with selling tech articles for online and print publication, I haven't gotten around to books yet) that if you're unknown in the book market, other than getting press releases on your new book out to various library/bookseller oriented publications and similar routine activities, unless you're the semi-legendary exception to the rule and your MS gets pulled out of the slush pile and droolingly ecstatic editors make the case to the suits for instant rockstar treatment and a six-figure advance, marketing is basically your problem whether you're self-publishing through a service like lulu or iUniverse or getting published by Simon & Schuster.
In any case, more than one book has gone from self-published POD books to the best-seller list via major publishers.
For everybody else... I'm surprised nobody has mentioned that the OpenSource Scribus DTP program will export directly to PDF format.
Tech Public Policy stuff
a) Buying it for two bucks and charging back a dime for handling or "prime location endcap premium" or something.
b) Buying it for two bucks less 5%
c) negotiating the price down to $1.90
I don't see much difference.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
Having been involved with print management for some time, we are frequently seeing advancements in rapid turnaround, low run, cheap cost per unit solutions. At digital Print World http://www.digitalprintworld.co.uk/ there were presses the size of football pitches that will (with one set of instructions!) print, laminate, cut & fold, collate & finally finish. The world of on demand books publishing is surely around the corner.... think iTunes for printed books!
did someone just re-invent latex? If so, good for them... a bit of wheel reinvention is good for the soul.
I thought maybe some publisher had come to their senses and decided "I know, why don't we make our entire catalogue (including the really old obscure shit) available on a print-on-demand basis". Now *that* is a service I'd be willing to pay a premium for!
Come to think of it, why don't we have combined printshop/bookshops for this?? A borders-esque shopfront you can go to, browse a list of titles/reviews, make a request ("I'd like x in hardback, y in paperback, and z in large format for the kids"), pay, and have a coffee+read while you wait? I mean come on, it would be trivial to set up (well, on the technical side, anyhow).
You should look into pdfLaTeX. Among other things, it supports both DVI and native PDF output -- this means direct support for a number of bitmap formats. While it does limit use of EPS files, when you have JPEG, PNG, and PDF inclusion, you don't really need EPS anymore. Fonts are standard Type 1 or OpenType (in some versions), so the whole bitmap font problem is eliminated.
Plus, pdfTeX has optical margin kerning and font expansion -- proper use of these features can take the output from "excellent" to "truly outstanding."
I'm not sure what you're getting at with sectioning. Yes, the usual LaTeX document classes have some problems with sectioning (like titles being fully justified -- they should be ragged right!), but since TeX is a macro language, an experienced user can write macros to get around most of those limitations fairly easily. And, once properly set up, they aren't any harder to use than the standard macros.
when will they have PINT on demand?? my "cup holder" is waiting ...
Also, I once had a girl's poetry bound for her in a nice book. Was it great poetry? No, she was no Blake. But it was a nice gesture, and it communicated what I wanted to communicate. I wasn't saying "you're a great poet whose work will survive through the ages," but "what you had to say was important to ME."
This isn't about breaking into the literary world and becoming famous. Sometimes there is a market of precisely one. But if I'm that one, I'd still like a way to buy the book I want for a price I can afford.
My in-laws bought my daughter (now nearing 18) a personalized laser-printed book with her and family's names in it. That was like 15 years ago. Of course, the pictures were stock. And last year Reason Magazine http://www.reason.com/0406/fe.dm.database.shtml sported a front cover with a satellite photo centered on the subscriber's house. The link goes to an article in that issue by Declan McCullagh. Of course, as a sibling post here points out, it's hard to say what's valid and what's not. On my copy was a picture of the local post office where I have a box.
I think there is a market for custom-designed editions of classic, public-domain works. I have reasonably-sized India-paper editions of Blake and Shakespeare, but they're long out of print, relatively expensive, and I can't easily replace them if they get damaged, so I'm hesitant to use them as casually as I would if I could just order another copy for $40 or so.
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Yes. Yes it will. Believe it or not, most professors actually CARE about the cost of the textbooks their students need. So called "Open Source" text books may not be popular (or complete, comprehensive, and accurate) right now, but being able to purchase reasonably priced print copies of a community-developed book or a book written by the instructor for his/her class will certainly have an effect.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Just because you can gather the scratch needed to print something does not mean you will find yourself on Oprah's book club
I do not think that means what you think it means.
While I would like to agree with you that published writers have some measure of style and quality, my experience in the book industry shows that even the larger publishers are printing and promoting absolute crap and they do not care. Even worse, the general public does not have great taste and can't tell the difference anyway (to be fair to them it would not be to harsh to call the general public stupid. Most do not even know the difference between fact and fiction on a normal day let alone when the Da Vinci Code had words like "true" or "fact" in it). Even here the frequent mention of such horrors "Cryptonomicon" proves my point.
Case in point: I have known people in mental hospitals to have published works of their stream of conciousness which have got national coverage and sold quite well. While this did not surprise me the fact that the author managed to coordinate the tasks of breathing and walking did.
People buy books because:
1. It was on TV
2. It is cheap
3. Their friend recommended it
4. It was packed four or five books high on the shelf / "Top 10" list
I have the material for a POD book, I think I have the marketing, I even have a proofreader who knows the subject.
However, most of the comments I have found on publishers are very much from a US viewpoint. My target market is mostly UK. How good are the publisher's UK distribution. lulu.com looks good and they distribute globally - does anyone have experience of them?
There may be a limited number of instances where you might want to use them, but I can't think of many. Perhaps a highly technical book with a limited audience, but then you're going make a pittance from your sales since you can't even set the price of your book. The worth of your book is dictated by the amount of paper it uses, not the words. Certainly no mainstream author would ever want to use the service unless they struck a deal with the POD service outside of the scales that the other schmucks get.
There is a lot of detailed info from an author's perspective about POD here.
This could be great for pirated books - download a book in PDF, send it to Lulu and get it printed. This would be definetly cheaper than buying those $50 computer-related books (although probably lower quality).
A somewhat related issue is using a Wiki to prepare contents for a book. I believe that there is lot of future in this since writing is more difficult than formatting, and using a wiki helps to organize ideas and collaborative work (testing it right now).
./ reader went through the experience making a book from Wiki and could tell us how it went ...
Now, for MediaWikis there is a sort of procedure. The German Wikipedia community seems to have the best experience so far and some reader really have been published in paper form.
WikiReader Handbuch and a Magnus' magic MediaWiki-to-XML-to-stuff converter
Btw there is also the idea that one could some day directly produce PDF from Wiki. A script for print on demand is on source forge .
Maybe a
SF&F author Piers Anthony, http://hipiers.com/publishing.html maintains a directory of various POD services. It's quite informative and pulls no punches regarding the bad apples.
Why is all the good stuff already modded 5, when I have mod points?
I love it when people posting to message boards complain about the decline in quality of printed material when more people gain access to it. Maybe we should just go back to medievil times when it was only legal for bibles to be published by the church. God forbid peasants learn to read and write, imagine what those "dumbheads" would say!
;P
People like you have been brainwashed to believe in the system. The only way good art gets made is with patronage. The only way for patronage to happen in our modern world is through large conglomerate industries. WTF? So more people have access to printing books, and this is bad WHY? You probably complain about blogs, myspace music, and any other recent spawn of the internet that allows the "illiterate" a chance. I fully understand that you may not hold these opinions, but I see them all repeated here, and its embodied in your post.
Of course the average quality declines, but the internet has made it irrelevant to calculate average. Communication is instant, all it takes is for one person to find the quality content and BOOM it spreads like wildfire.
People need to wake up, especially you slashdotters who spread this ignorance that every publication needs to be quality for something to be worthwile. Most slashdot posts aren't worth much, but we still come here right? Hell I don't read the articles, I come for posts like yours
"how can they call it a MINE if everything here is THEIRS?!?!" -Straight Jacket
I hope this happens. In particular, I've been hoping that JIT publishing and community-generated textbooks would revolutionize the public school system, saving huge amounts of money while reducing the politics and misinformation that have crept into textbooks.
Unfortunately, even though the technology is advancing to the point of feasibility, we're still missing the community-generated textbooks. In the meantime, the for-profit publishers won't bother passing along their savings to their customers.
The difference is that he's not talking about a per-piece charge, but a (hopefully) 1-time lump sum, under the table.
Percentage discounts to major distributors are, well, standard. Mind you, we're not talking shelf space. Distributors are just that, a middleman between the publisher and the store or chain. What it means when a distributor aggressively carries you is that you are able to rapidly increase your volume, at the expense of losing some margin.
Personally, I like to set up direct relationships with stores and chains if at all possible, but they require a lot of individual attention, and if you don't have the staff to treat them well, you're screwed.
m-
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
I have no reason to believe that it's any different in the field of book publishing, at least for writers without the market clout to demand specific editors, you get whoever gets assigned to you and try to make the best of it.
If anything, the self-publishing route gives one more choice with respect to editors. Plus, of course, there's no question in anybody's mind as to who that editor is working for.
I didn't say that one should simply pay the first editor who comes along who offers a rate for editing a book, one should check references and work samples where possible and discuss exactly what's needed and what the editor can do with that editor, it's just like the process for hiring any other kind of consultant.
Tech Public Policy stuff