Not returning, but plodding

In perhaps the most controversial book-related post over Christmas, Susan Hill opined that there are too many bookshops. She'd cut their number in half. Why? Because so few books are read, and because of "returns", which she sees as a great evil.

Well, there may indeed be "too many" bookshops in the UK.  The stock in bookshops has a low price per unit and is hence expensive to keep if it doesn't sell. However, the "answer", as I boringly keep saying, is print on demand. Here is a post by Martyn Daniels (on 2 Jan) at the Booksellers Association blog about PLOD --print locally on demand. The Espresso print machine, says Mr Daniels, can print, cut and bind up to 20 books in an hour. At New York City library, it will provide copies of out-of-copyright books at $3 each. (See my Petrona post of 21 Dec on this technology.)

Knowledgeable authors of various websites and blogs have predicted that 2007 will be the year in which POD takes off as a "mainstream proposition". We already have POD providers such as Lulu. Authors are producing their own books by POD and selling them online on Amazon and other sites. The quality is good and the price reasonable, in the examples I've tried. In my 21 Dec Petrona post, I drew attention to Random House, which is publishing a relatively small range of POD books and promoting them on its website.

I can't see the sense in book publishers continuing to pay huge advances, only to consign most of the expensively produced results to "returns", when POD is good quality, affordable, and the Internet is there to allow promotion and scaling up. (Think of the various online bookselling sites such as localbookshop.com in the UK, as well as Amazon and its rapidly evolving competitors.) In this way, more authors can be published and readers can have more choice. Nobody loses, as publishers can still produce "conventional" books (big advance and a print run) when they feel they have a winner on their hands.

Comments

[marydell]

Although there's been lots of talk about POD recently, I wonder if anyone has taken a look at how profitable it actually is. If the machine costs US$50k and can print at around US$0.005 per page, a 200-page book would cost US$1.00 to produce. Retailing each book at US$3.00, the machine would have to print 250,000 books before turning a profit.

Here's what I wonder: What's the lifespan of the machine? Will it pay for itself before pooping out or becoming obsolete?

Printing a book for US$1 is kind of expensive. Using public domain books and available electronic sources (like Google) saves some back end cash, but I can't see publishers making a huge capital investment for such a small profit margin. It just doesn't seem cost effective to print books in house when a US$30 hardcover can be done in Hong Kong for about US$0.50 per unit.

For the consumer, POD does have a fun factor to it. I like the idea of having a book printed just for me. When the machine is up and running in New York, I will have to check it out.

[Clare]

Just come here to add (my usual) support for POD but now I've seen MaryDdell's comment I'm not so sure. There's more to this than is immediately obvious, isn't there?

[Susan Balée]

Did you mean to pun on "Not waving, but drowning"? If so, POD seems the worst of two choices.....

[Maxine]

Let's not get too hung up on this particular machine. We know that POD is economic: there are lots of POD publishers offering services to authors, enabling them to produce their books to a reasonable price. Lulu is the best known but there are lots of others -- Amazon is stuffed with people selling self-published books for between 5 and 10 pounds, and well-produced too (the ones I have bought). Indeed, Amazon has its own POD service, Booksurge. It is going to come, big-time. If I were the investing type, I'd be investing. A big publisher can easily afford the technology and can publish "POD" with a fraction of the price it has to use for advances -- it already has the marketing/internet infrastructure to support it. Susan and Marydell, take a look at the Random House programme -- I think you will have to agree that it seems clear that it makes economic sense for them and other publishers to continue in this direction rather than to rely on agents and gamble.