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

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

[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: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.