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

old school

[blinder]

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."

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

[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.

cheaper -yes better - no

[foobsr]

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.

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.

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-

Great for special occasions

[14erCleaner]

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.

Print On Demand Isn't Just For Authors

[zetasmack]

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.

Re:Why not Latex+templates?

[Jack Action]

If you know how to use LaTex, you could set up a lulu.com book in about 10 minutes.

LaTex has had a "book" template for years, and true to its purpose as "type-setting sofware" (created by Donald Knuth at Stanford), it creates an absoutely picture perfect document with chapter headings, and eye-pleasing margins and hyphenation. This is all done automatically according to the principles of typography printers have been using for hundreds of years (though of course they can be manually over-riden). All that is required is that you learn a few html-like mark-up commands to format your text.

I've printed one novel with lulu.com and LaTex, and the inner text was easily as good as hard-cover books from the 50s and 60s (which I consider kind of a golden age of printing). The cover though does require some graphic design skill , as I think a professional designer noted above (though lulu.com does have a gallery of about 50 stock covers you can use).

Also, lulu.com was started by Bob Young, founder of Red Hat Linux, because of the terrible experience he had publishing a book through conventional means. I believe lulu.com runs on FOSS software.