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."

Comments

Experience with Lulu.com

[rdwald]

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.

Re:Experience with Lulu.com

[bcrowell]

My experience with lulu has been a little more mixed. I have some free-information textbooks that I sell in print. (Even though they're free to download, sometimes it's nice to have a real printed, bound copy.) I had been buying them in batches of about 500 from a local guy, storing them in a closet, and selling them to schools and individuals. The problem was, it was just an incredibly inefficient way to do business. Recently, I've been experimenting with lulu. The good news is that they're incredibly efficient, and can produce a single book at about the same unit price as I'd been getting from a traditional printing process (or maybe just a little more). When I get an individual retail order, they take care of it. I've canceled my credit card processing account (which was a major pain to have). No more trips to the post office to mail books. Most importantly, I no longer have to keep ~$10,000 worth of inventory in a closet.

There have been some problems, though:

1. They sometimes do a lousy job of packaging books, and the books arrive damaged. If you complain, they're willing to send replacements, but only if you send them digital camera pictures to show the damage. It doesn't seem that reasonable to me to expect my customers to go through that kind of hassle for something that's basically due to lulu's sloppy packaging.
2. A bigger problem has been that they don't do a very good job of supporting the pdf standard and OSS. Basically the situation seems to be that they have a number of subcontractors who actually produce the book, and which subcontractor it's sent to may depend on the geographical location of the customer. These subcontractors don't fully support the pdf standard. Part of the issue seems to be that some pdf documents take a lot of cpu time to print, so they put arbitrary, undocuments limits on various things. Also, there are things you can do with fonts (such as subsetting) that are allowed by the pdf standard, but that certain subcontractors may not allow. The machines (docutechs?) they use are totally proprietary. What it adds up to is that some of my books would print 10 or 100 times just fine, and then on one particular order I'd get a message passed back from the subcontractor saying that it failed to print. You can post on their forums about problems, and people there have been very helpful, but you actually can't get any information back from the subcontractor. Basically lulu says that if you use Acrobat to produce your pdf, and embed all fonts without subsetting, it will work, but if you use OSS to produce your pdf, it may or may not work. A little ironic, since IIRC the founder of lulu was one of the guys who started Red Hat. It's a little like web designers who only test their sites on IE; lulu only cares if their system works on Acrobat output.

Re:No other formats?

[plover]

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.

Not for you...

[gnovos]

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.

Re:Not to be confused with readability

[cfulmer]

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.