Every aspect except one, that is.

As the three day event progressed I realized that one subject was being overlooked. I pored over the conference schedule seeking programming about print on demand. I found none.

Why should I have expected any? It was an e-book conference, not a print conference, right? Well yes, unless you think of PODs as e-books that are printed and bound. And I happen to think that’s what they are.

It’s not surprising that few think of print on demand as a form of electronic publishing. Because POD produces a tangible object – a printed book – we lump it together with other machine-made goods. Of course, all printed books are machine-made, whether offset in large quantities or printed on demand in small ones. But that’s where the resemblance stops.

Offset printing is designed to serve a traditional bookstore distribution model. After publishers make educated guesses about how many copies they can sell, they print copies to distribute in bookstores. Because they cannot predict how many copies will be sold, a great many will be returned to publishers for full credit. In the last few decades the return rate for trade books has soared to 50% and even higher, and if the decline of publishing industry can be attributed to any single business practice, the consignment model of printing and distribution is it.

Contrast that with print on demand, in which copies are not printed until customers have ordered them on the Internet and paid for them in advance. Although books printed on demand are occasionally returned, the return rate in POD is negligible.

Unlike offset printing, POD is ideally suited for a book industry based on preordering – what might be called the Amazon model, a model that is transforming the retail landscape. (See A World without Inventory, Part 1 and Part 2)

The offset and on-demand business models could scarcely be more different from each other. On the other hand, POD and e-books are twins – fraternal twins perhaps, but twins nevertheless. (They were even born the same year, 1998.) The way you order a POD book is identical to the way you order an e-book. The only difference is that the printed volume is “uploaded” into your mailbox instead of your e-reading device.

When we founded E-Reads in 2000 we made POD one of our foundation stones. We were certain that until a viable popular e-reader was created, the reading device of choice would remain the printed book. This turned out to be correct. Until very recently, when the Kindle revolution took hold, POD sales represented about 50% of our revenues. It remains a significant contributor to our – and our authors’ – revenue stream. And of course it provides printed copies to those readers who prefer them to e-books. And there are still a lot of them.

It is also becoming a significant option for small presses and big publishers alike. David Taylor, President of Lightning Source Inc., arguably the largest POD press in the world, reported last spring that business was growing at a rate of 20% to 30% annually. Lightning prints, binds and ships 10,000 copies a day on machines that run around the clock. And that’s just one POD company. There are others including one owned by a little outfit called Amazon. Many independent publishers are shifting to a purely POD model, and bigger houses use POD to keep books in print after inventories diminish and the cost of doing new print runs is prohibitive.

If we may therefore presume to make a suggestion to the program directors of Digital Book World, some attention to POD in 2012 would be welcome by many attendees. How do I know? Well, about 20,000 people have signed up for the On Demand Expo in Washington DC in March 2011.

Are POD’s e-books? Without a doubt.

Bron: E-Reads.com

Giving away an e-book seems to lead to at least a spike in sales of the print version, Researchers at Brigham Young University have found, especially for fiction.

In research that monitored the sales of 41 print books in the eight weeks before and after a free version was released, study authors John Hilton III and David Wiley said they found “a moderate correlation between free digital books being made permanently available and short-term print sales increases.”

All 41 books in the study (via Boing Boing) were made available as complete PDF downloads (as well as other formats in some cases), including two by former Wired.com managing editor Leander Kahney that he distributed for free via bit torrent. Hilton and Wiley’s data showed that giving the books away resulted in higher print sales in the eight weeks following the giveaway than during the same time period preceding it for fiction (a 26 percent increase), non-fiction (5 percent) and Random House releases (9 percent).

The only category in which giving the books away for free digitally eroded the market for print books was for titles sold by Tor Books, a division of Macmillan focused on science fiction and fantasy titles. The study’s authors don’t know why that was the case, but they speculate on one possibility: Tor only made its e-books freely available for one week, whereas the others were available for eight weeks or longer, and it required users to register before downloading them. It’s possible that in order for e-book giveaways to boost print sales, readers must have easy, unencumbered access to the free version.

Of course, if most of the reading public switches to e-book readers like the Kindle or the iPad, this model would fall apart because, obviously, giving away an e-book wouldn’t cause people to choose to pay for the same. But that tipping point is likely still years away; as things stand now, this study indicates that publishers would do well to embrace the concept of “free” as a marketing tool while the getting is good.

Printing on demand is booming business

Gebaseerd op: Economist, The (5-3-2010)Printing on demand is een booming business. Zo beschikt de Londense boekhandel Blackwell over de zogeheten Espresso, een machine die een boek drukt en bindt in de tijd die ervoor nodig is om een kopje koffie te drinken. Vandaar de naam.

Verloren uitgeverijen eerst terrein en inkomsten aan het internet als distributiekanaal en aan elektronische boeken, nu dreigen ze ook het monopolie op het drukken van boeken te verliezen. Op dit moment wordt zo`n 6% van alle boeken in de VS on-demand gedrukt via toner-based of inkjetmachines en naar schatting zal dit percentage de komende vijf jaar oplopen naar 15%. In 2008 werden zo`n 285.000 titels on-demand gedrukt, voor het eerst in de geschiedenis meer dan op de traditionele manier.

De snelle groei wordt niet alleen verklaard door de verbeterde printtechnologieën van de zogeheten POD-machines, maar vooral door het feit dat printen on demand vele malen minder verspillend is dan drukken; zo`n 30% van de gedrukte boeken wordt aan de uitgever geretourneerd. En hoewel het nog steeds duurder is om een boek digitaal te laten printen, is printing on demand weer goedkoper. Er wordt immers alleen gedrukt wanneer er een koper is en er zijn geen restvoorraden.

bron: Profnews – Vakinformatie voor professionals