Examining the Era of Print-on-Demand 162
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."
No other formats? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No other formats? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:No other formats? (Score:2)
I haven't paid much attention to on-demand printing so far. This may not be the same as "being published" as some folks have mentioned, but I could definitely see this stuff being used for clubs and other groups though (promotional material, bylaws, etc.).
old school (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [lulu.com] (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."
Re:old school (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:old school (Score:2)
Re:old school (Score:2)
Re:old school (Score:2)
Of course, since 1996 or so, I don't think I've dealt with a publication that didn't accept emailed
Re:old school (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [marketsync.com] does Print-on-Demand for marketing departments and agencies through a salesforce.com plug-in called Marketsync On-Demand Marketing [marketsync.com].
Re:old school (Score:3, Funny)
Re:old school (Score:3, Insightful)
Basically, unless a marketing gimick is genuinely useful or entertaining, people will learn it very fast and ignore it.
For example, if your hypothetical mail actually knew that Rob *enjoyed* his time at space mountain and sug
Not to be confused with publishing (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:2, Interesting)
But what about for people like me?
I'm currently writing a book, but I'm well aware I'm not a wonderful writer. It is just something I do in my free time if I get bored.
I think it would be fun to be able to give "my book" to friends and family.
And I'm sure this service is marketed to people like me...
Re:Not to be confused with publishing (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
Mentality, yes. However, passing along the mp3's of an unsigned band is much more friendly than passing along either multiple printed copies of something, or the files it was printed from. On the one hand you'll be out lots of cash and on the other you'll have a hard time trying to get someone to read 100+ pages on a laptop.
I was just trying to point out that there are places out there who will use this technology a
Re:Not to be confused with publishing (Score:3, Insightful)
probably, but they wont be very succesful when someone googles pod and finds out they can publish through a place like lulu with zero up front. this is not the vanity publishing of the past because the user doesn't end up taking out a second and having a garage full of boxes of books.
Re:Not to be confused with publishing (Score:2)
then along came lulu-- zero risk, zero barriers to entry. want to take it further and pay for professional editing and help? you can. they'
Re:Not to be confused with publishing (Score:2)
Re:Not to be confused with publishing (Score:3, Insightful)
The people who go to vanity publishers usually do so because their work isn't good enough for the professional publishing houses. I'm not saying that to injure egos, I'm saying it because it's true. Self-publishing -- that is, publishing your own material as your own editor and paying all the costs of book production -- is almost always an exercise in futility, because writers need editors.
Of course, it's not an absolute, and I think it would be really great if more top-notch talent, like Cory Doctorow, us
Re:Not to be confused with publishing (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not to be confused with publishing (Score:2)
Re:Not to be confused with publishing (Score:2)
Re:Not to be confused with publishing (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Not to be confused with readability (Score:3, Insightful)
And the quality of the material. Writers -- especially fiction writers -- who self-publish do so because they can't get their work published anywhere else. And it shows; I've read more than enough overly-long descriptions of how beautiful/sexy/handsome/perfect the masturbatory protagonist is in the first paragraph of POD books to know there's a lot of dross out there.
And even the rare gem that gets through usually needs the guiding hand of a vicious editor.
Re:Not to be confused with readability (Score:3, Insightful)
See, I wasn't going to go there, but yes. This is the true evil of POD. My favorite was one that a 'friend of a friend' sent me through the mail. It was called "Towboat Terrorist." Priceless.
However, if POD becomes more rampant and the Internet becomes the new bookstore and distribution center, the market will keep all the "obsidian orbs" at the bottom of the pile. Would love to see a resurgence of beat writers...
Re:Not to be confused with readability (Score:3, Insightful)
sure maybe i can't write for crap and no one will ever read a word. s
Re:Not to be confused with readability (Score:2)
All very good points. However, the large publishing houses will, in that scenario, continue to have a monopoly on wide distribution and popularity, because they've got something the vanity publishing houses usually don't: A stable of very experienced (and bloodthirsty) editors.
The technology exists, obviously, to produce very professional-looking books on demand. But the same can't be said for producing professionally-edited material.
Re:Not to be confused with readability (Score:2)
publishing on demand certainly does not gaurantee quality, but the traditional model does not do so either. i've payed for and read plenty of books that were horrid. i wonder how many really great books never saw the light of day because the traditional model missed them.
Re:Not to be confused with readability (Score:2)
I will say I agree that the model's not perfect. An editor can end up dismissing a great story for any number of bad reasons, including the editor's mood that day. And I certainly hope that if a story really is good, but maligned by publis
Re:Not to be confused with readability (Score:2)
but i do really like the idea, no matter how long the odds, that there are chances for anyone who wishes to try.
Re:Not to be confused with readability (Score:3, Interesting)
Speaking as a writer, that's not so true any more. As large(r) corporations have bought up a lot of the smaller or formerly independent publishing houses, the culture has changed. While in the past editors would actually spend a lot of their time editing, nowadays it is much more of a sales/marketing position, with most of the actual editing being done by agents and their sta
Re:Not to be confused with readability (Score:2)
"Towboat Terrorist." I really feel sorry for whatever synapse misfired badly enough to produce that title.
I hate to bag on POD, I really do, because the concept is wonderful. But in many ways, it suffers from the same problem as the internet itself; anyone can say anything, so... anyone will say anything.
Re:Not to be confused with readability (Score:3, Interesting)
Music works similarly; most unsigned bands suck, but most bands on MTV suck too.
Re:Not to be confused with readability (Score:3, Interesting)
I disagree. I'm an avid reader, and never lack for quality material. Sure, the publishing houses produce a lot of crap, too, but unlike MTV there are a lot of choices. Don't like what Tor puts out? Baen has a huge line-up of talent. Don't like any of them, either? Take a browse through Random House's catalog. Prefer smaller, less mainstream stuff? Try out Small Beer Press, publishers of the extremely good 'zine "Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet." Or Wheatland Press. Or... See what I mean? There's a ton of
Re:Not to be confused with readability (Score:4, Informative)
Publishing-on-demand has the potential to solve two problems in the publishing industry: meeting the relatively low demand for out-of-print books and inventory. The first problem is that books go out-of-print because low demand makes traditional volume publishing economically infeasible. But, a publisher that is able to economically meet that demand has an additional source of revenue. Inventory, the second problem, is the perpetual beast of industry -- it drains cash flow, consumes storage space and increases the cost of failure. There's nothing like making 100,000 of something, only to have it sit on store shelves for 2 months before the stores pull it from the shelves. Publishing on demand avoids that risk.
Re:Not to be confused with publishing (Score:2)
Re:Not to be confused with publishing (Score:2)
Re:Not to be confused with publishing (Score:2)
Re:Not to be confused with publishing (Score:2)
Re:Not to be confused with publishing (Score:3, Informative)
But there are books I'd like to write that might only sell a few hundred copies per year. No mass-market publisher can make money on a title that doesn't sell thousands of copies, and they're rightfully reluctant to ship copies of ultra-niche books to bookstores that can return them for full credit if they don't sell.
So PoD, here I come!
This doesn't mean my PoD books will
Re:Not to be confused with publishing (Score:2)
Exactly right. I expect my JavaCC book [generating...javacc.com] to sell about that - maybe - each year. But since it's published by a small outfit, that's OK. We'll sell ~60 copies, break even, and consider the rest gravy.
Re:Not to be confused with publishing (Score:2)
In reality there's no clear line between 'published' and 'not published'. There's vanity-press stuff that's absolute crap. There's stuff published by large distributors that is absolute crap. There's vanity-press stuff that's never read by more than a handful of people. There's self-published stuff that sells ten thousand. T
Re:Not to be confused with publishing (Score:2)
cheaper -yes better - no (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Experience with Lulu.com (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Experience with Lulu.com (Score:2)
Re:Experience with Lulu.com (Score:4, Informative)
My experience with lulu has been a little more mixed. I have some free-information textbooks that I sell in print. (Even though they're free to download, sometimes it's nice to have a real printed, bound copy.) I had been buying them in batches of about 500 from a local guy, storing them in a closet, and selling them to schools and individuals. The problem was, it was just an incredibly inefficient way to do business. Recently, I've been experimenting with lulu. The good news is that they're incredibly efficient, and can produce a single book at about the same unit price as I'd been getting from a traditional printing process (or maybe just a little more). When I get an individual retail order, they take care of it. I've canceled my credit card processing account (which was a major pain to have). No more trips to the post office to mail books. Most importantly, I no longer have to keep ~$10,000 worth of inventory in a closet.
There have been some problems, though:
Re:Experience with Lulu.com (Score:2)
Re:Experience with Lulu.com (Score:2)
Re:Experience with Lulu.com (Score:3, Informative)
Software may be good... (Score:3, Interesting)
The software may be good, but output is still another matter. Print has been making great strides in resolution, but laser copy has a tendency to stick to vinyl binders and inkjet runs when wetted.
i'd like a tiny little 4 colour offset press, please.
As a designer... (Score:5, Insightful)
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:As a designer... (Score:2, Funny)
Actually that got quite good reviews in the Times and Atlantic Monthly.
Re:As a designer... (Score:2)
I'm wondering if there isn't a market for.. (Score:2)
I think this is a great alternative to the old vanity presses.
Re:As a designer... (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, there are a lot of editors out there who either way too aggressive ("correcting" non-errors), or too timid (afraid to change anything). It can take a while, but a good editor who really knows the subject is a godsend.
m-
Re:As a designer... (Score:2)
Perhaps at some level you are also just producing templated layouts though, it's just that the space of layouts is big enough that you believe they are all different. This might be called 'your style'.
Re:Benjamins (Score:2)
Distributors charge money to be there, eh? That's funny, although I've been in the business for 15 years, I've never experienced that. They want discounts to beef up their profit margins, but what else is new.
It takes a relatively modest investment to get something printed, and getting distribution is a lot easier than
All due to better printers? (Score:2)
The article is severly lacking in juicy technical details but if you had a printer that would not only print the pages but bind it and put a dust jacket on it then the difference between printing 10,000 different books and 10,000 copies of one book is zero.
That's my hunch. The easier and faster printers become
Re:All due to better printers? (Score:2)
Xerox has been consistently improving their perfect-binding module for increasingly small printer/copiers models. This module will catch sheets coming off the printer, stack them up, fold them in half and put a binding on them. There's generally some overhead from the time between separate jobs, but, yeah, there's barely any price difference between 100 copies of the same thing or 100 different things.
Keep in mind that in Xerox's case, at least, these aren't exactly the binding quality of something you'
Printing-schmrinting... (Score:2)
When we wanted to write something, we had to do it all by hand. All we had to write on was a good old-fashioned hillside and our trusty hammer to write it with.
No sirree, none of these childish "publishing packages" for us. We used to trudge up in the hills all day long to find a good spot to scribble on, and we loved it!
Re:Printing-schmrinting... (Score:2)
You had a hammer
Re:Printing-schmrinting... (Score:2)
Re:Printing-schmrinting... (Score:2)
Great for special occasions (Score:5, Interesting)
Print On Demand Isn't Just For Authors (Score:5, Interesting)
lulu rules (Score:4, Interesting)
you don't have to worry any more about getting ripped off. write your great american novel, put together your great coffee table book, whatever you want-- and put it out there. lulu keeps on going but i really thought by now it would be much bigger than it is.
Re:lulu rules (Score:2)
Re:Print On Demand Isn't Just For Authors (Score:2)
I have 2 books that I have written. One is along the lines of "Steel this book" http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/156858217X/sr=8-1
Not for you... (Score:4, Informative)
Lulu is cool, but marketing is the key problem (Score:2, Insightful)
I've said it time and again: Your best idea, magnificently executed is the smallest part of a successful product.
It's easy to do a great print-on-demand title [howtoshowyouknow.com] (shameless book plug...), and Lulu does a great job of producing the books, guiding you through getting you in the distribution chain.
But then you have to market, market, market. The books, calendars, etc. that sell best are those that:
The ultimate DRM (Score:2)
Re:The ultimate DRM (Score:2)
Re:The ultimate DRM (Score:2)
This is already a solved problem, as the gigabytes of scanned books on your favorite P2P network attest. The OCR won't be perfect, but it's good enough.
Better? Yeah. Cheaper? For the publisher, maybe (Score:4, Insightful)
But will this mean a significant decrease in already overpriced college textbooks? Not a chance.
Re:Better? Yeah. Cheaper? For the publisher, maybe (Score:2)
Re:Better? Yeah. Cheaper? For the publisher, maybe (Score:2)
The end of "out of print"? (Score:3, Interesting)
In such a world, we could try to pass legislation under which refusing to sell a book on a POD basis meant forfeiting the copyright.
In today's world things like "Lord of Light" and the Lensman series have gone out of print, and that is just plain wrong.
Re:The end of "out of print"? (Score:2)
His estate ought to be able to revive those somehow, even if the big publishers don't see opportunities for mucho dinero in them. I know he had a family when he passed away -- I want to buy his works, and I want them to reap the rewards of it.
why limit this to books? (Score:3, Interesting)
Easier, cheaper, and a lot faster than trying to find it in used/collectible, and in general, the only way any record company will ever make money off their content "in the vaults".
Of course, since this is rational, it isn't going to get done until consumer electronics companies start buy
Re:The end of "out of print"? (Score:2, Informative)
We've already been seeing in the industry a trend towards shorter and more frequent print runs. Instead of printing 10,000 copies, publishers like to print 1,000 copies 10 times. The pressure on existing traditional printers to reduce make ready costs is a direct result of on de
Since we're on the subject... not so shiny writing (Score:3, Funny)
Writer Beware [sfwa.org]'s blog linked recently to "Opening paragraphs of recent PODs that yielded an abbreviated read [blogspot.com]".
...all this makes me wonder why there's no Emergency Editor Squad (operating under the Language Police). =)
Re:Since we're on the subject... not so shiny writ (Score:2)
Customized prints (Score:2)
will any of these print public domain works? (Score:2)
UK POD recommendations? (Score:2)
However, most of the comments I have found on publishers are very much from a US viewpoint. My target market is mostly UK. How good are the publisher's UK distribution. lulu.com looks good and they distribute globally - does anyone have experience of them?
Vanity publishing for suckers (Score:2)
Great for pirated books! (Score:2)
Re:Why not Latex+templates? (Score:2)
Exactly. But latex is best for math and complex documents (cross reference and citation stuff).
Colors and lines and pictures of the family and art stuff may not be easy in latex.
PS- Anyone using LaTeX on a PC, check out the new 1.4.2 version of LyX with a installer that does everythging for you (GS, latex, spellchecker libs). LyX is a great front end to LaTeX, but getting it to work under cygwin once was a beast. I have used it for nearly ten years and have been quite happy with the results. Math you ca
Re:Why not Latex+templates? (Score:2)
Re:Why not Latex+templates? (Score:2)
Long answer: Noooooooooooooooooo.
E.
Re:Why not Latex+templates? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Why not Latex+templates? (Score:4, Interesting)
I think this is incorrect. Many people (including me) have had unpredictable problems with producing books from pdf files output by tex or pdftex. For people using dvi-flavored tex, the standard advice on the lulu forums seems to be to upload the postscript file, and then lulu's server will run it through Adobe Distiller before they send it to their subcontractors, who produce the book using proprietary RIPs. There may be a lot of OSS running on lulu's servers, but it's not all OSS, and proprietary software is definitely involved at various steps in the process.
Sure. (Score:2)
It would be good if LaTeX 3 ever got released, but the mailing list is silent and the website suggests nobody has done any signifcant development in years. If LaTeX 3 progress remains dead, I'd say fork the development tree a
Re:Why not Latex+templates? (Score:2)
See for yourself --- It's Only Rock 'n' Roll but I Like It [e-butik.se]. I am thinking of starting my own publishing house here in Sweden using Books On Demand [books-on-demand.com]'s service.
Re:Making a hardcopy is not the bottleneck (Score:2)
Surely you jest! We have all known since the 60s that "The Medium is the Massage."
http://www.marshallmcluhan.com/main.html [marshallmcluhan.com]
all the best,
drew
(da idea man)
you may be missing the point (Score:2)
What do you want for free? (Score:2)
Any online publication service will be happy to sell editing and proofing services to you at extra charge, or line up your own.
If you want to buy marketing services, google.
With respect to marketing as provided by publishers, it's my understanding based on what experienced professionals have said (I have plenty of experience with selling tech articl