Print on demand: a perfect storm? - by David Taylor
Print on demand: a perfect storm?
David Taylor, Managing Director, Lightning Source UK and Senior
Vice President Global Sales
Genuine print on demand (POD) is the ability to print and distribute a single
copy of a book from a file that is held digitally. Sell book, print book has started to
replace print book – then try to sell it.
The traditional publishing model is characterized by the offset printing
of inventory at levels based on best guess sales estimates and its storage in
distribution centres. The sales effort is geared to the stimulation of orders. A key
aim for the publisher’s production function is achieving the lowest unit cost for
the number of copies that the publisher wants to hold in stock.
Printing too many copies runs the risk of writing off stock; printing too few,
the risk of losing sales. The acronyms RPUC (reprint under consideration), RP
(reprinting) or TOS (temporarily out of stock) all add up to one thing: a missed
sale and an unhappy customer. The print-on-demand model means that a book
is always available.
There is little doubt that POD is becoming an increasingly important part
of inventory and supply chain management for traditional publishers and their
distributors. Market trends and advances in digital print capabilities are set to
accelerate the take-up over time. Traditional publishers use print on demand in a
number of different ways, and here are just a few:
- keeping titles in print and capturing sales that otherwise would have been lost,
- bringing titles back into print from OP (out of print) status,
- issuing titles in paperback for the first time,
- reducing inventory levels and the cash tied up in the business,
- reducing warehousing needs,
- import and export via printing in the sales market, and
- development of new products and revenue streams (for example, large print
editions).
However, print on demand is having another major impact in the global book
trade and one that is fuelling a rapid rise in the number of titles that are in print.
Genuine print on demand allows a publisher to operate a virtual stock policy with
titles being printed only when there is an order. This model removes the need to
tie up capital in speculative inventory, and the need for real estate warehousing
and distribution facilities.
Lightning Source, for example, offers fulfilment systems that allow not
only publisher/distributor direct ordering but also a buy/sell relationship with
wholesalers and internet retailers. In this scenario, a publisher need not carry
any inventory or indeed physically handle the book to fulfi l an order. Inventory
is printed from a digital file only when an order is received. The only entry cost
for the publisher is the setting up and management of the digital file and its
associated metadata.
The effect of this model is to reduce dramatically the barriers to entry in
terms of capital for a start-up publisher; this in turn has stimulated an explosion in new publishers entering the market for whom print on demand is core to their
whole business model. This new type of publisher is fundamentally a selling/
marketing model with a very different looking balance sheet to the traditional
publisher and its requirement to hold and fi nance speculative inventory.
In addition, print on demand has allowed completely new publishing
models to emerge. In the US in particular, there has been an explosion in the
field of self-publishing in the last five years, underpinned by both the print-on-demand model and the ability to support and market these titles via the internet
bookselling model.
The other major new model to emerge on the back of print on demand is the
content aggregator. Such an organization brings books back from the out-of-print
graveyard. An out-of-copyright title can be scanned and reissued as a facsimile of
the original, even dropped into a generic cover, and made available in the market
via the provision of metadata about the title to the book trade.
Print on demand allows publishers to meet single copy demand for their
content in a phenomenon that has come to be known as the ‘Long Tail’. The
internet bookselling model allows the consumer to find obscure titles not usually
stocked in bookshops. The coming together of POD, the Long Tail and the
internet bookselling model is starting to look like a perfect storm.
Clark and Phillips, Inside Book Publishing, 2008, pages 215-16
