Technological change shakes up book production

A nice, short piece in the Economist covers everything from changes to production systems and book retail with economies of scale an important consideration too. Electronic book readers have had a lot of attention recently, but there may be a good deal of life left in the paper format yet…

Print on Demand (POD). Imagine if you wanted a book, you just pressed ‘print’. Well, the technology has arrived in the form of ‘Espresso’, a wardrobe sized bookmaking machine at Blackwell, a bookshop in central London, and 30 other locations worldwide. Printing books on demand, rather than on a publisher’s hunch could make a big impact. Consider these points:

POD would revolutionise the batch production systems used widely today, when books are printed in production runs according to forecasts in demand.

POD would minimise the expense of stockholding, which is considerable in book retail. The industry’s supply chain is extremely wasteful. About 30% of books in America are returned to the publisher.
Although producing individual books in this way is pricier, it allows for very small, niche book markets to survive and thrive. Books are only printed when there is a customer. University presses, with their thousands of slow sellers, have been among the first customers.

It opens up the world of any of the 2m out-of-copyright books scanned by Google (and a few thousand from conventional publishers) though many are still
wary of making their content available in this new form.

Despite all its advantages, POD is unlikely to take over the world. This is because in contrast to digital printing, whose per-unit costs stay pretty much the same, traditional printing exhibits strong economies of scale. As long as you have bestsellers with hundreds of thousands of copies, on-demand printing is not going to displace the conventional sort. It’s the age old advantage batch production is always likely to have over ‘job’ production.

I still think the demand for POD could be massive. Imagine one in every airport or railway station. What about every school?