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

No other formats?

[Atzanteol]

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.

Not to be confused with publishing

[The Queen]

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.

Re:Not to be confused with publishing

[ultramk]

It's not as strict a line as it used to be. There are quite a few smaller publishers out there that do quite well in focused market segments. Often they start with someone self-publishing and being very successful at it, from where they go onto publishing other authors.

Mind you, I don't think the fiction market works this way. Many other markets are much less entrenched.

I work for a small publisher that started this way, and I wouldn't call selling 2m+ copies (at $32.95) a "vanity" press.

Like lots of other industries, it's less monolithic than it was 30 years ago.

m-

Re:Not to be confused with publishing

[MasterC]

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.

You'll excuse me if I find this mentality quite on par with the music and movie industries. I really have little desire to explain myself simply because I think I'd be preaching to the choir. In short, however, the internet I think can make a dent in this mentality if not overcome it. Things haven't matured enough, IMHO, to make a foregone conclusion either way but I thought it was worth pointing out.

Re:Not to be confused with publishing

[biendamon]

The people who go to vanity publishers usually do so because their work isn't good enough for the professional publishing houses. I'm not saying that to injure egos, I'm saying it because it's true. Self-publishing -- that is, publishing your own material as your own editor and paying all the costs of book production -- is almost always an exercise in futility, because writers need editors.

Of course, it's not an absolute, and I think it would be really great if more top-notch talent, like Cory Doctorow, used the internet to get out from behind the publishing houses.

Re:Not to be confused with publishing

[stoolpigeon]

there are places out there who will use this technology and try to scam unwary authors into paying to be published.
 
probably, but they wont be very succesful when someone googles pod and finds out they can publish through a place like lulu with zero up front. this is not the vanity publishing of the past because the user doesn't end up taking out a second and having a garage full of boxes of books.

Re:Not to be confused with publishing

[stoolpigeon]

the whole point of publishing on demand is that you are not paying all the costs of book production. the people who buy the books pay that. if no one ever buys the book-- none are ever printed and the author loses nothing but their time and bandwidth used to upload the document. that's it.

Re:Not to be confused with publishing

[narcc]

The people who go to vanity publishers usually do so because their work isn't good enough for the professional publishing houses.

No... people go to POD/vanity publishers to meet a specific need.

A few examples:
A good number of universities require students to submit a bound copy of their dissertation (meeting ALA standards). POD makes this easy and affordable.

Some books are of local interest only, and need very short print runs -- A local historical society may want to publish book, series of books, or books for special events (i.e. for a towns 150th aniversary).

A local museaum may want to publish a book related to a particular exhibit. (Not all museaums are big -- in Greenville, PA [Pop. ~6,500] there are *two* museaums.)

An individual may want to compile a geneology into book form to hand out at a family get-together.

A new bride might want to compile wedding photos and stories into book for friends and family.

A photographer might want a portfolio he could pass out to clients.

A teacher may want to publish a text specific to a class s/he teaches or a collection of lecture notes and course materials.

I could go on. The point here is the POD business is far larger than the yahoo who thinks their poetry collection is going to be a best seller or their sci-fi/fantasy novel is going to spark a phenomenon.

As a designer...

[ultramk]

...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-

Re:As a designer...

[ultramk]

Yes, that's a good point. Good editing is key, because frankly, people just can not proof their own work. It's a special kind of blindness I think. Good editors will turn a good project into a great one, and make suggestions that the author never considered.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of editors out there who either way too aggressive ("correcting" non-errors), or too timid (afraid to change anything). It can take a while, but a good editor who really knows the subject is a godsend.

m-

Making a hardcopy is not the bottleneck

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Not to be confused with readability

[biendamon]

It's still all about distribution and marketing.

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!")

Re:Not to be confused with readability

[The Queen]

*howl*

See, I wasn't going to go there, but yes. This is the true evil of POD. My favorite was one that a 'friend of a friend' sent me through the mail. It was called "Towboat Terrorist." Priceless.

However, if POD becomes more rampant and the Internet becomes the new bookstore and distribution center, the market will keep all the "obsidian orbs" at the bottom of the pile. Would love to see a resurgence of beat writers...

Re:Not to be confused with readability

[stoolpigeon]

it's not evil - it's awesome. sucky, talentless hacks have every bit as much right to get their work out there. we talk about the move from scarcity to abundance and this is a small example. books used to be rare and extremely valuable and the printing press changed the world. well publishing on demand means that i can write a book, and distribute all over the world, without the huge economic barriers that existed in the past.
 
sure maybe i can't write for crap and no one will ever read a word. so what? why should that matter? in fact, a lot of junk got published the old way and some gems got missed. now everything can be published and all the gems at least have a chance.
 
some people will look down on it, just like some people look down on 'popular' authors. i think this is more a reflection of the hubris that is a large part of the human condition as opposed to the worth of those works.
 
once upon a time it was a big deal to own a book. then it became a big deal to write a book. i look forward to when having written a book is no more a big deal than owning one.

Lulu is cool, but marketing is the key problem

[Anonymous Coward]

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:

• already have some momentum before publishing - i.e. "the ugliest dog in the world"
• those that already have a community ready to buy - software projects, web communities on a particular topic
• those that have real-life communities lined up - college courses, "open university" type fun-education classes

Other than that, it's a long slow slog to make a buck.

Maybe try posting on Slashdot to get some attention!

Re:old school

[SuperRob]

Oh, it gets far more interesting and complex than just magazines. Print-on-Demand is a gateway to doing fully personalized stuff. Imagine a comic writer who could make the reader a character in the story by doing a simple name replace on each issue printed. When you can do "one-offs", this becomes what people expect. The bar is being raised quick.

For a marketing agency, this allows you to send out personalized sales brochures and other collateral, which can have a massive impact on response rate. Combine something like this with sophisticated data mining, and I shudder to think how eerie some direct mail could get. "Hey Rob, remember how much fun you had on Space Mountain last year? Walt Disney World wants to invite you and your wife Andrea back for another ride ..."

Fair Disclosure: My company, Marketsync does Print-on-Demand for marketing departments and agencies through a salesforce.com plug-in called Marketsync On-Demand Marketing.

Better? Yeah. Cheaper? For the publisher, maybe

[Dachannien]

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.

Re:old school

[AaronLawrence]

I think you overestimate the interest people have in this kind of "personalisation". Most people will almost instantly identify such obvious fill-in-the-blanks stuff (after all it's only slightly more than the form current junk mail which fills in a few bits of info into a form letter).

Basically, unless a marketing gimick is genuinely useful or entertaining, people will learn it very fast and ignore it.

For example, if your hypothetical mail actually knew that Rob *enjoyed* his time at space mountain and suggested something else he is also likely to enjoy, with enough detail for him to agree with the idea, that would be useful and successful. If on the other hand it mindlessly suggests the same attraction again, or just selects from affiliated rides with no regards to the customers desires, that is unhelpful and pushy and will be ignored after the first time or so.