On Tuesday I did my third Communiversity class on Self-Publishing with Print-on-Demand (POD). It was a time for me to reflect on the industry, and to take a look at what’s happened in the last year. The answer is simple: POD has hit the mainstream.
During class I had mentioned one way to identify POD books is the barcode on the last page of the book block. After class one student, a cartoonist who works at a local public library, came up and mentioned that he now understands what he’s been seeing lately: major authors’ backlist titles have been arriving in the library, in hardcover, with the barcode on the last page (he mentioned James Patterson). Another student then mentioned that she’s bought books at Borders with the barcode and also wondered why it was there. A third student then said he had written a backlist book at a well-respected publisher who was thinking about reprinting the book in POD. At first he was skeptical, but then said, “Well, since it’s POD, ship me one and let me check it out.”
The verdict from all of these students—who had real-world examples—was that POD titles are virtually indistinguishable from traditional paperbacks. They look just the same. Students coming to me having seen and/or purchased POD books is something new.
That James Patterson would be printed POD makes sense to me in this case. For backlist hardcover, the market must surely be institutions who want to replace books that have been damaged or lost. The demand is probably not strong, but it’s a core audience who needs to be served. Enter POD.
In fact, almost all aversion to POD seems to have gone by the wayside—the industry is now using POD even for bestsellers (albeit temporarily). As Publishers Weekly reported last month, PublicAffairs used POD to fill in a gap in supply for Scott McClellan’s bestselling memoir. And this too makes perfect sense.
My question is how antiquarian book dealers will approach this phenomena. Using the McClellan book as an example, will the very limited number (7,000 is mentioned) of titles produced POD, will this in fact add to those copies’ value? Or will it be treated the way any other printing is treated, despite the smaller numbers. Only time will tell.
Another unforeseen benefit to POD must surely be the re-Americanization of the printing industry. Almost all major offset printing is now headquartered in Asia (Hong Kong, Singapore, etc.), but POD printing’s virtue is On-Demand. And shipping from halfway around the world is anything but.
Everyone stands to gain from POD, except for distributors and warehousers. But Ingram was truly visionary and not only saw it coming but got in first, and now they’re going to benefit mightily.
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