Has POD's time finally arrived?

The POD (print on demand) publishing model I keep on asking about seems to be getting even closer to critical mass, as outlined here: Joe Wickert's Publishing 2020 Blog: The Tipping Point for Print on Demand?.

My basic and oft-repeated point is to wonder why the "mainline" book publishing industry operates on the huge advance/remainders system, as the quest for the next Harry Potter or Da Vinci Code is losing them (on average) a lot of money. These days the big publishers won't look at books unless submitted by an agent, so they aren't even experts at selecting the books any more; they have become marketeers, trying to catch a commercial trend rather than being innovative and original. Hence this Christmas, one can't move for books with titles almost identical to last year's "surprise hit",  "Does anything eat wasps?" and last Christmas it was the same for piles of books called, with minor variants, the same as the previous year's bestseller,  "Eats, shoots, and leaves".

Why don't publishers use POD as standard? Random House does it in a limited way. Probably other publishers do too. The idea is that most titles would be selected for publication by the publisher, but not actually printed. Instead they are "marketed" by the publisher's website (lots of traffic via advertising and so on), and copies sold print-on-demand.

The few authors that get published now would not, in this system, get the big advances unless they were already established, but many more perfectly good and interesting authors would get published by this method even though they won't sell millions or even thousands of books. In the POD system, the publisher isn't losing oodles of money on gambling on a few potential big sellers and ignoring the many other good authors whose themes don't fit some preconceived market demand. On the contrary, by using a combination of a big marketing budget for promoting a programme, and a POD system for providing the books to order, the publishers can take advantage of the proven economic benefits of the long tail.

Because of blogging and the internet, authors of the books can link to their entries on the publishers' website and provide wonderful "niche" marketing and help to sell their own books directly via the publisher, a win-win situation. If the publisher links into sites like the independent booksellers' network, the distribution is taken care of as well -- purchasers can order the book online at the publisher site and pick it up after it is printed from their local bookstore.

There must be something wrong with this utopian vision because it hasn't happened. Publishers are still churning out "celebrity" books "by" Victoria Beckham and a host of other people I've never heard of --- which go direct from Christmas stocking into the remainder bin. Lots of excellent authors are not being published at all.

Joe Wickert's post linked above is about a new POD system called Espresso, which Joe suggests the big chains install in their shops in order to compete with Amazon. Sounds good for books, good for readers, and good for authors. So what's the catch in all of this? Why isn't it happening globally across the industry?

 

Comments

[Prairie Mary]

I think the sticking point is in the buying public. They still have it in their heads that a "real" book is published, meaning many copies on a big press machine. To them, POD is xerox with staples.

They need more demos.

Prairie Mary

[Maxine]

That's a good point. Maybe now that people are quite used to ordering books (and everything else) over the internet, and POD is pretty quick, publishers should market it "as" something else, i.e. not actually call it POD. The few books I have read in this format have been good quality - or at least certainly from the point of view of size of print and whiteness of page. The binding may not be great, but probably not worse than many "conventional" paperbacks.

[Clare]

I would love it to happen. Some books are slow steady sellers and POD would be ideal for this. It is too expensive to keep them in stock and yet occasionally people want to buy a new copy. But as Mary says I think people need to see demos to be convinced.

[Scott Stein]

This is exactly how my publisher, ENC Press, operates. They echo your discussion of the outdated mainstream publishing business model and explain how their model allows for editorial risk-taking at http://www.encpress.com/opinion.html#publish and http://www.encpress.com/pulp.html. The big challenge is the same as with more mainstream books, just more pronounced (and maybe not that much more). How do you get people to actually learn of a book available mainly from the publisher? In case you haven't already, you can see how I am planning to market MEAN MARTIN MANNING at this link: http://scottstein.powerblogs.com/posts/1164858261.shtml. A description of the novel is at: http://www.encpress.com/MMM.html

[Scott Stein]

Sorry, the URL should not have a period at the end for this one: http://www.encpress.com/pulp.html

I hope this adds to the discussion.

[Maxine]

Thanks, Scott, it is good to know that some publishers operate this way.
To answer your point about the visibility, one way is for the publisher to do it online, eg via hooking up with networks like the independent booksellers' network or even Amazon. Also, if the publishers aren't spending lots of money on big advances and wasting it on remainders/pulping, they can spend more on marketing their own websites and the books on them (eg newspaper ads).

[SUSAN HILL]

I am doing an MA and some of the books I need are quite obscure, even if not old, and mostly POD. Price is huge - double at least a regular copy, so a 40.00 book - normal in the academic world, becomes 80.00 which is a lot to pay for a book which then falls apart after being consulted twice. Until the technology is better and POD is cheaper, it won`t be more than a marginal way of selling books . which is a pity. If they would put their energies into making this right instead of chasing the e-book dream, there would be fortunes in it.

[Maxine]

It is a pity that these books are quite expensive, but I wonder how much obscure (academic) books are when published conventionally. Quite expensive too, I think. I have found that the novels I've bought POD have been slightly, but not a great deal, more expensive than conventionally published -- between £6 and £8. But I have only ever bought half a dozen.
I do think you've raised an important point, though, which is about academic study and libraries. There would have to be a way by which academic libraries could obtain POD copies free or subsidised for use by students. We need Tim Coates to advise on that.