A Few Words About Print-on-Demand                 May 2006

Print-on-demand (POD) technology has been readily embraced by self publishers and vanity presses. Early POD books were often of inferior physical and literary quality when compared to those produced by conventional printing and publishing methods.  With improvements in the technology, POD printers can now produce a book with text and jacket having a quality that is virtually indistinguishable from that produced by offset printing. Many reputable, if not prestigious, presses are now utilizing POD technology for book production.

Newpages.com currently reports on the Caravan Project funded by the MacArthur Foundation, in which six leading non-profit publishers (Beacon Press, University of California Press, New Press, University of North Carolina Press, Yale University Press, and The Council on Foreign Relations Press), plan to use print-on-demand technology for the production of certain books.

A brief search of the web reveals numerous other highly regarded presses that use print-on-demand technology. Among these are the following:

Harvard University Press, about 3,000 titles available by print-on-demand
                  http://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/pod.html 
Princeton University Press
Copper Canyon Press
Johns Hopkins University Press 
                  http://www.johnshopkins.edu/divisions/sel_centers/jhupress.htm  
Cornell University Press
Zondervan Publishing House
Indiana University Press 
Princeton University Press
University of California Press
SUNY University Press
Penn State University Press
Oxford University Press, prints 100,000 books per yr with POD 
                  http://www.oup.co.uk/booksellers/pod/
Cambridge University Press
University Press of Florida
Texas A&M University Press
Harcourt Trade Publishers
Rutgers University Press
University of Queensland Press
  
  
 Pertinent quotes and misc. info:

 "This year's [IPPY] Awards also saw increased numbers of participants, winners and finalists in e-book and Print-on-Demand format, reinforcing the viability and growth of these new publishing technologies."  
             ---Independent Publisher

From The Nation, May 20, 2002 

"The single most significant technological development to affect publishing since, arguably, the paperback revolution, is the maturing of print-on-demand technology. . . . publishers need not put a book out of print or overprint it by the hundreds of thousands. Presses can now simply meet demand as it rises, whether a single copy or a hundred. Print-on-demand technology renders the economics of scale that have so fettered publishers, largely obsolete, to the advantage of all.

"We, and many other presses, both commercial and academic, are simply applying new technologies to do what we do best: publish good books and, now, with print-on-demand, keep them available ad infinitum."
                  --- Niko Pfund, Oxford University Press


From the Chronicle of Higher Education
These days, the technology has improved and the costs [of POD] have decreased, leading some academic publishers to move completely to digital printing. University presses that use on-demand printing say it saves them tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year . . . Harvard University Press was one of the first academic publishers to use digital printing.  After the press found success in reprinting sold-out books that way, officials started doing first print runs digitally . . . http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=wpjx0zxpj6q8d9lvb1n2pt8z3w1shbjc

     
Types of Publishers using POD services today: 

---University Presses for extensive backlists & new monographs 
---Scientific, Technical, Academic, Professional & Reference Publishers for extensive backlists, new books & journal back issues 
---Trade Publishers for low demand imprints, series or titles 
---Religious literature publishers 
---Multinationals publishing in Europe/North America wishing to print an ISBN for local demand 
---Publishers outside UK or USA who want to access those markets faster without international shipping costs 
---Author Services organisations for all new titles 
---Very small independent publishers or "micropublishers" (>10 titles per annum) with no distributor/limited credit for all new titles 
                    ---Paul Williams, Lightning Source UK Ltd


MIT Communications Forum 
"Quality is threatened by everything, but it survives. Quality takes care of itself. It can't be expunged. It can't be lost in the shuffle. There will be a lot of terrible books in the marketplace as a result of this technology, but they'll go away."
---Jason Epstein, Transformations of the Book, http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/forums/book.html