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."

No other formats?

This seems very interesting. It would be nice if they would accept existing formats as well as whatever is generated from their application. But I like the idea of printing low-volume books becoming cheaper.

Re:No other formats?

You need to read deeper into the article. Different publishers are accepting source materials in different formats. Blurb has their composer on a web site, Picaboo gives you a free download of their software, and Lulu takes PDFs. Shop around, and find the one willing to work with you. They all seem comparably priced for the end product, which isn't much more than you'd pay for an ordinary hardbound edition from a well respected author.

old school

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 [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

Oh, it gets far more interesting and complex than just magazines. Print-on-Demand is a gateway to doing fully personalized stuff. Imagine a comic writer who could make the reader a character in the story by doing a simple name replace on each issue printed. When you can do "one-offs", this becomes what people expect. The bar is being raised quick.

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].

Not to be confused with publishing

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

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

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.

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

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.

Re:Not to be confused with readability

That's an excellent point -- traditional publishing is a multi-step process designed to pick marketable books, refine them, get them into the market and get them sold. Print-on-Demand allows people to get to print faster, but does so by bypassing the publishing process and the value it adds. It seems to me that your concern is not so much publishing on demand, but self-publishing because it avoids all the filters and product refinement of traditional publishing.

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.

cheaper -yes better - no

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

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.

Re:Experience with Lulu.com

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:

1. They sometimes do a lousy job of packaging books, and the books arrive damaged. If you complain, they're willing to send replacements, but only if you send them digital camera pictures to show the damage. It doesn't seem that reasonable to me to expect my customers to go through that kind of hassle for something that's basically due to lulu's sloppy packaging.
2. A bigger problem has been that they don't do a very good job of supporting the pdf standard and OSS. Basically the situation seems to be that they have a number of subcontractors who actually produce the book, and which subcontractor it's sent to may depend on the geographical location of the customer. These subcontractors don't fully support the pdf standard. Part of the issue seems to be that some pdf documents take a lot of cpu time to print, so they put arbitrary, undocuments limits on various things. Also, there are things you can do with fonts (such as subsetting) that are allowed by the pdf standard, but that certain subcontractors may not allow. The machines (docutechs?) they use are totally proprietary. What it adds up to is that some of my books would print 10 or 100 times just fine, and then on one particular order I'd get a message passed back from the subcontractor saying that it failed to print. You can post on their forums about problems, and people there have been very helpful, but you actually can't get any information back from the subcontractor. Basically lulu says that if you use Acrobat to produce your pdf, and embed all fonts without subsetting, it will work, but if you use OSS to produce your pdf, it may or may not work. A little ironic, since IIRC the founder of lulu was one of the guys who started Red Hat. It's a little like web designers who only test their sites on IE; lulu only cares if their system works on Acrobat output.

Software may be good...

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...

...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-

Making a hardcopy is not the bottleneck

This article is only about the progress of the MEDIUM, not about the progress of human thought or some kind of intellectual literary breakthrough. The hardest part about making a good book is coming up with compelling content. Any monkey can press keys on the keyboard now and click "Print". In fact many household pets and human babies have been known to jump on their parent's keyboards and accidentally print out gibberish. The key to making something worthwhile to read is having interesting subject matter. I don't care if it is written in 3D-Holographic-Magic-Time-Shifting-Newsprint-from- the-24th-century, if it is written poorly, then nobody will care or remember. I would rather read something written on delicate parchment, or something scribbled in the margins of a notebook in Crayola, if the IDEA contained in those scribbles is unique, amazing, and earth-shattering. For example, suppose somebody urinated in the snow, the equations for faster-than-light-speed travel. Even though the medium that the message is communicated in, is utter garbage, the message itself is divine and priceless.

LOL! MY POST IS SWEET!

All due to better printers?

It would seem to me that the reason DIY book making could be getting cheaper is better printers. The easier and faster it is to print something the cheaper and more flexible you become for DIY books.

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 to do this sort of thing, the cheaper DIY printing will become. Anyone with actual technical knowledge about the printers behind the scenes care to chime in?

Would this not be the step beyond assembly line production? You can completely customize the output without sacrificing the ability to make duplicates. Next step: rapid prototyping [wikipedia.org] of 3-D objects done in similar high-volume custom jobs.

Why not Latex+templates?

Would this not be the perfect application for a LaTex?

Re:Why not Latex+templates?

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.

Re:Why not Latex+templates?

I believe lulu.com runs on FOSS software.
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.

Printing-schmrinting...

You young 'uns and your fancy-schmancy "Desktop Publishing" and "print on demand". In my day, we didn't have this ninny-winny "DTP software" with "cookbook templates".

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!

Print on Demand?

I've been printing on demand since I owned my first printer. When I demand something printed, I hit the print icon (or the command print file.txt for the DOS fans).

Great for special occasions

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

As a student photographer I was planning on throwing a bunch of photos together and printing it via apple and iphoto [apple.com]. 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 [lulu.com]. 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 [lulu.com], my website [prunejuice.net], 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.

lulu rules

it just amazes me that the profile of lulu is still so low. vanity press companies have existed for years- squeezing big bucks out of want to be authors. look at how much money gets dumped into the 'be a succesful author' business. along comes lulu and practically drops every economic barrier to entry.
 
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.

Not for you...

Blurb isn't for people like slashdot readers, trust me. You can get beter quality for less at Qoop, Lulu or even by going to the book printers directly.... But only if you know how to make a PDF, which is beyond the scope of most people... thus the 100% blurb markup.

Lulu is cool, but marketing is the key problem

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:

• already have some momentum before publishing - i.e. "the ugliest dog in the world"
• those that already have a community ready to buy - software projects, web communities on a particular topic
• those that have real-life communities lined up - college courses, "open university" type fun-education classes

Other than that, it's a long slow slog to make a buck.

Maybe try posting on Slashdot to get some attention!

The ultimate DRM

Want to have a serious barrier to copying your electronic text files? Make people buy them on paper.

Better? Yeah. Cheaper? For the publisher, maybe

One potentially useful application for print-on-demand is the publishing and distribution of textbooks. The costs of dealing with extra unused books are eliminated, and customers no longer have to wait two weeks at the beginning of the semester for their semi-out-of-print book to arrive at the bookstore.

But will this mean a significant decrease in already overpriced college textbooks? Not a chance.

POD not just for books

I work for a printing company and we offer POD services for coppanies that might need to have distrubuters or customers have branded and personalized matierals. You can see a demo of what is about at http://www.tavawava.com/demo/ [tavawava.com]

The end of "out of print"?

I'd like to live in a world where I could click on anything in a publisher's backlist and get it printed and shipped to me.

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.

Since we're on the subject... not so shiny writing

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). =)

Customized prints

I wonder if the publishers can offer customers the chance to customize their books. Get a custom imprint on the first page, order special high-gloss paper, oversize coffee table prints, pocket-sized travel editions, leather binding, gilt edges. That way you could get a sturdy copy for yourself, a run of paperbacks for the class you teach, and a special leather-bound set for Christmas presents, each with a special inscription, and a special hand-cut vellum edition for your grandparents' fiftieth anniversary.

What exactly is publishing?

Faster ways to format material for printing eliminates one bottleneck in the publishing process; easy production of small numbers of physical books eliminates another. What I don't often hear is what sort of publishing book creators actually want to accomplish. I can see these services being very handy for specific kinds of publishing and distribution projects, like your church or organization assembling a cookbook for fund-raising drives or printing a small set of instruction books for your proprietary software. But what does this have to do with the kind of publishing services offered by the big houses: editing, marketing, distribution, etc.? Will the next Da Vinci Code or Tom Clancy thriller be POD? I doubt it. I do see the economies of initial production getting a little cheaper, which might make big publishing houses a tad more willing to try out new authors, but their entire business model is based on shooting for blockbusters. The questions that need to be asked include: How will you get anybody to order your book? Who will edit it and advise you and how to enhance it? (It was said that Theodore Drieser delivered his manuscripts to the editor in a truck, and the editor returned them in a taxicab.) Who will vet the book for libel or accuracy? These are some of the things that reputable publishers currently provide. These programs, as clever as they might be, won't.

will any of these print public domain works?

I may be a market of one, but I'd like a way to print custom editions of public-domain works. I have before me a Nelson pocket bible, a very small and thin 1,000-page book that will lay open on my knee while I'm scribbling in a Moleskine journal propped on my other knee. It's the perfect size for traveling, for carrying in a backpack, etc. What I want is a way to get ANY public-domain work printed in just this type of small, durable binding, on India/bible paper, for a reasonable price. It annoys me to no end that there is no India-paper edition of Shakespeare in print. Why the heck not? I also want similar editions of Blake and Milton. If I could get any public-domain work printed in the same dimensions, on the same paper, I'd be one ecstatic customer, and someone would get a lot of my money.

I think there is a market for custom-designed editions of classic, public-domain works. I have reasonably-sized India-paper editions of Blake and Shakespeare, but they're long out of print, relatively expensive, and I can't easily replace them if they get damaged, so I'm hesitant to use them as casually as I would if I could just order another copy for $40 or so.

UK POD recommendations?

I have the material for a POD book, I think I have the marketing, I even have a proofreader who knows the subject.

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

Print on Demand (POD) is simply the latest incarnation of vanity publishing. They will sell any rubbish because they DON'T CARE what they print. All they care is that you, the author pay up front for one of their price plans, and get suckered by the selling up. There is no quality threshold - you pay and you're in. They won't even spell check, typeset, edit, or market your book unless you pay them and for that you probably get some drone scanning your guff. That is the definition of vanity publishing. It would not surprise me if the majority of their sales were back to the author themselves.

There may be a limited number of instances where you might want to use them, but I can't think of many. Perhaps a highly technical book with a limited audience, but then you're going make a pittance from your sales since you can't even set the price of your book. The worth of your book is dictated by the amount of paper it uses, not the words. Certainly no mainstream author would ever want to use the service unless they struck a deal with the POD service outside of the scales that the other schmucks get.

There is a lot of detailed info from an author's perspective about POD here [sfwa.org].

Great for pirated books!

This could be great for pirated books - download a book in PDF, send it to Lulu and get it printed. This would be definetly cheaper than buying those $50 computer-related books (although probably lower quality).

MediaWiki books

A somewhat related issue is using a Wiki to prepare contents for a book. I believe that there is lot of future in this since writing is more difficult than formatting, and using a wiki helps to organize ideas and collaborative work (testing it right now).

Now, for MediaWikis there is a sort of procedure [wikimedia.org]. The German Wikipedia community seems to have the best experience so far and some reader really have been published in paper form.

WikiReader Handbuch [wikipedia.org] and a Magnus' magic MediaWiki-to-XML-to-stuff converter [wikimedia.de]

Btw there is also the idea that one could some day directly produce PDF from Wiki. A script for print on demand is on source forge [sourceforge.net].

Maybe a ./ reader went through the experience making a book from Wiki and could tell us how it went ...

Piers Anthony

SF&F author Piers Anthony, http://hipiers.com/publishing.html [hipiers.com] maintains a directory of various POD services. It's quite informative and pulls no punches regarding the bad apples.

Re:rtfa, not what I'd hoped for

Books by Bookends, in Ridgewood, N.J., does exactly that. Their parent company, Long Dash Publishing, also acts as a vanity publisher.

Actually POD is not a synonym for vanity publisher. POD is a printing process and nothing more. I own an extremely small publishing company, with only one title so far, and my book is printed by the POD method. I obtained a business license, purchased my own ISBN numbers, wrote the book, typeset it, designed the cover, and submitted the files to the printer/distributor. They print and distribute the book through Ingram, and pay me once a month. My book is available through Amazon, B&N, Powells, etc., and at brick-and-mortar stores by special order. The list price of the book is $41 and was set by me. I don't have any control over the actual selling price though; I've seen it offered for prices ranging from $25 to $80.