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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."
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.
You need to read deeper into the article. Different publishers are accepting source materials in different formats. Blurb has their composer on a web site, Picaboo gives you a free download of their software, and Lulu takes PDFs. Shop around, and find the one willing to work with you. They all seem comparably priced for the end product, which isn't much more than you'd pay for an ordinary hardbound edition from a well respected author.
John
In short, however, the internet I think can make a dent in this mentality if not overcome it.
Mentality, yes. However, passing along the mp3's of an unsigned band is much more friendly than passing along either multiple printed copies of something, or the files it was printed from. On the one hand you'll be out lots of cash and on the other you'll have a hard time trying to get someone to read 100+ pages on a laptop.
I was just trying to point out that there are places out there who will use this technology and try to scam unwary authors into paying to be published. It's an old industry and there's a sucker born every minute.
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
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!"
I'm a professional writer. Besides thousands of articles, I've written three books for Prentice Hall and I'm getting ready to do a fourth.
But there are books I'd like to write that might only sell a few hundred copies per year. No mass-market publisher can make money on a title that doesn't sell thousands of copies, and they're rightfully reluctant to ship copies of ultra-niche books to bookstores that can return them for full credit if they don't sell.
So PoD, here I come!
This doesn't mean my PoD books will be badly-designed or unedited, just that they aren't economically feasible for big publishers to handle.
- Robin
That's an excellent point -- traditional publishing is a multi-step process designed to pick marketable books, refine them, get them into the market and get them sold. Print-on-Demand allows people to get to print faster, but does so by bypassing the publishing process and the value it adds. It seems to me that your concern is not so much publishing on demand, but self-publishing because it avoids all the filters and product refinement of traditional publishing.
Publishing-on-demand has the potential to solve two problems in the publishing industry: meeting the relatively low demand for out-of-print books and inventory. The first problem is that books go out-of-print because low demand makes traditional volume publishing economically infeasible. But, a publisher that is able to economically meet that demand has an additional source of revenue. Inventory, the second problem, is the perpetual beast of industry -- it drains cash flow, consumes storage space and increases the cost of failure. There's nothing like making 100,000 of something, only to have it sit on store shelves for 2 months before the stores pull it from the shelves. Publishing on demand avoids that risk.
I've worked in the printing industry for more than a decade, and specifically the on demand printing industry as it has developed, and am presently bringing the book priner I now work for into the digital "on demand" printing age.
We've already been seeing in the industry a trend towards shorter and more frequent print runs. Instead of printing 10,000 copies, publishers like to print 1,000 copies 10 times. The pressure on existing traditional printers to reduce make ready costs is a direct result of on demand. And yes, this technology can handle one offs already. The toughest part is managng the job: billing one at a time costs more than producing it, especially when the paying clients aren't publishers but end users.
The various technologies already out make for an inevitable change in my industry. I count myself fortunate to be at a company that is making the change to move with the trend, albeit later than I would've done if I were the owner.
One color and two color (1/c and 2/c) digital presses are becoming fast enough and cheap enough to compete with even the most cost effective "zero make ready" traditional presses (which are never truly "zero make ready") at higher and higher volumes. 4/c work is already cost effective for many runs, like only a few hundred of a book with many pages. (Many pages = more forms on press = more make ready costs). The key point in the industry is the cross over point: at what volume does it become more cost effective to print traditionally. That cross over point is getting higher and higher each year, and depending on the work (page counts, quality expectations, book block color specs, etc.) can already be in the thousands on some jobs.
And as for quality, these aren't the office laser copiers and desktop ink jets a previous poster lamented on. Some of the toner presses' "ink" doesn't really "stick to plastic." Xerox's iGen3 is a toner, though their marketing department likes to call their toner "liquid." HP's Indigo line, while technically still a plastic, is suspended in liquid, emulating ink. The inkjets are lagging in image quality, but the ink doesn't run nearly as easily as implied. This isn't the same ink you buy at Office Depot after searching racks for just the right HP cassette number. Instead, the ink jet manufacturers (Kodak Versamark, for example) focus on speed over print quality. Within 5-7 years I would not be surprised at all to see their quality approaching what we see from lower end toner devices today. Wat they do now is already impressive, and their speed is already far better than other technologies, and has more room for increases.
The part of the industry the article doesn't touch on much is the binding. There are some fantastic new perfect binders coming out specifically geared towards the digital market (see Morgana's products for low volume work, Standard Horizon for more high end, as well as traditional binder manufacturer Muller Martini's recent developments in digital workflows). But more to the point of the article, some hard cover case binders are getting more cost effective at low quantity work as well. It's one thing to have an otherwise high quality soft cover book of your own doing. But nothing evokes more pride than the same case bound.
No, high volume publishers need not worry (though this article doesn't touch on the changes digital is already bringing about in their world). Instead, this concept, which practically didn't exist 5 years ago, has already made at least a few friends of mine quite rich, a large number of average joes quite proud (of the personalized hard cover keepsake books they had printed for their wedding or team with their kid's phoe on the front cover), and has kept quite a few printers in business.