The Future of Publishing: Print on Demand
I spent the weekend at BEA, networking and doing research for my new book.
On Sunday, I spent quite a bit of time visiting Lightning Source to learn about their printing model. They are the print-on-demand subsidiary of Ingram, the largest book distribution company. If you buy books from Amazon or barnesandnoble.com, your book passed through Ingram on its way to you.
Lightning Source operates plants that have digital presses capable of doing short runs (<1000 copies) at a reasonable price, down to single copies. They service everyone from the major publishers to university presses to self-published authors, helping them all produce only the copies that customers want to buy. Oxford University Press has put its entire backlist (books from earlier years) on Lightning Source, making it possible for them to keep many more books in print than they could when they had to have large print runs.
There are thousands upon thousands of new books released every year, and under the old model, few of them made money. The long print runs required to get the per-unit cost down to a reasonable level created a high barrier to entry and a ton of non-value-added waste, in its most visible forms: books printed and then pulped without ever leaving the publisher’s warehouse, books shipped to the retailer to support a major push, and then shipped back unsold, a huge remainders market for the ones that didn’t sell.
That is a lot of trees and a lot of oil being saved.
For the major publishers, this may not lower their costs all that much - marketing, editing and design still consume a lot of money and energy. An author will still need to produce a book that will justify that investment. But it does lower their risk and give them the ability to maintain much larger backlists, since the electronic files associated with them are essentially free. It replaces one of the most rigid parts of the publishing process with a flow that is much more adaptable: they can print a small number of copies, and if the book takes off like a rocket, they can make more.
That’s good news for everyone, except maybe the pulping plants.
On Sunday, I spent quite a bit of time visiting Lightning Source to learn about their printing model. They are the print-on-demand subsidiary of Ingram, the largest book distribution company. If you buy books from Amazon or barnesandnoble.com, your book passed through Ingram on its way to you.
Lightning Source operates plants that have digital presses capable of doing short runs (<1000 copies) at a reasonable price, down to single copies. They service everyone from the major publishers to university presses to self-published authors, helping them all produce only the copies that customers want to buy. Oxford University Press has put its entire backlist (books from earlier years) on Lightning Source, making it possible for them to keep many more books in print than they could when they had to have large print runs.
There are thousands upon thousands of new books released every year, and under the old model, few of them made money. The long print runs required to get the per-unit cost down to a reasonable level created a high barrier to entry and a ton of non-value-added waste, in its most visible forms: books printed and then pulped without ever leaving the publisher’s warehouse, books shipped to the retailer to support a major push, and then shipped back unsold, a huge remainders market for the ones that didn’t sell.
That is a lot of trees and a lot of oil being saved.
For the major publishers, this may not lower their costs all that much - marketing, editing and design still consume a lot of money and energy. An author will still need to produce a book that will justify that investment. But it does lower their risk and give them the ability to maintain much larger backlists, since the electronic files associated with them are essentially free. It replaces one of the most rigid parts of the publishing process with a flow that is much more adaptable: they can print a small number of copies, and if the book takes off like a rocket, they can make more.
That’s good news for everyone, except maybe the pulping plants.
Labels: adaptive systems, BEA
posted by Katherine Radeka
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5:56 AM
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