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Are PODs ebooks?
January 31, 2011 | 10:34 am
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By Paul Biba
Very interesting article in Richard Curtis’ Publishing in the 21st Century. Here’s a sample:
When we founded E-Reads in 2000 we made POD one of our foundation stones. We were certain that until a viable popular e-reader was created, the reading device of choice would remain the printed book. This turned out to be correct. Until very recently, when the Kindle revolution took hold, POD sales represented about 50% of our revenues. It remains a significant contributor to our – and our authors’ – revenue stream. And of course it provides printed copies to those readers who prefer them to e-books. And there are still a lot of them.
It is also becoming a significant option for small presses and big publishers alike. David Taylor, President of Lightning Source Inc., arguably the largest POD press in the world, reported last spring that business was growing at a rate of 20% to 30% annually. Lightning prints, binds and ships 10,000 copies a day on machines that run around the clock. And that’s just one POD company. There are others including one owned by a little outfit called Amazon. Many independent publishers are shifting to a purely POD model, and bigger houses use POD to keep books in print after inventories diminish and the cost of doing new print runs is prohibitive.
If we may therefore presume to make a suggestion to the program directors of Digital Book World, some attention to POD in 2012 would be welcome by many attendees. How do I know? Well, about 20,000 people have signed up for the On Demand Expo in Washington DC in March 2011.
Are POD’s e-books? Without a doubt.
More stuff in the article.
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Comments:
A nice thing with POD is theoretically a book can always be available (as long as someone has the rights and offers it for sale). Will we one day move to a model where only the big sellers like King, Grisham, Roberts, etc. get a “real” print run and everything else is POD? Imagine a bookstore where a large majority of it’s space is dedicated to single display copies for browsing and you can then buy a regular POD copy (hardcover or paperback depending on what you prefer), a large-print copy or an ebook copy on demand. They could even offer copies translated by computer to almost any language (once translation software gets better) all from one digital file right there in store. Nothing out of stock ever.
(Not my idea or anything, Robert Sawyer mentions something like this in Flash Forward)
Yep….and there is a back door at Lightning Source that opens in to an Amazon delivery operation that makes a city post office look trivial. The average edition run is 1.4 books and those books (10,000 per day) are streaming, from order screen to print delivery, same day.
The digital revolution, whatever that is, has benefited print books as much as screen books. Paper and print industries were early in conversion to digital production since the reading device and delivery format did not need invention and development as was required for screen books. The result is that print has advanced its own future faster.
Exactly Brian. A vista suggested here often, even before Mr Sawyer. It makes sense as a business model, except even the big names will dwindle over time imho.
The POD model, particularly that running through Lightning Source and Ingram, also illustrates a key difference between POD and purely digital. I publish via POD. I send Lightning two files, one for the cover and one for the interior, and make a few on-screen database entries. Two weeks later and without my doing anything else, that book is available from all the major online book retailers in the world, including one, The Book Depository, that ships post-paid to 100 countries via the UK’s Royal Mail. And the physical copies print or will soon print at some six locations on three continents. That’s distribution, effective, easy and simple.
Contrast that to digital where there are competing, incompatible formats and readers and a distribution scheme that forces authors and publishers to deal with online retailers separately, with differing and clashing contracts for each. It’s enough to make a grown man cry. If this is the future, then it’s a future created by fools.
The difference? POD is in a mature market and the market leader is Ingram, a well-established, family-run firm with no visions for world domination. They do their job, make a modest profit and avoid the limelight. Those involved in print publishing play by long established rules, rules that aren’t perfect but are reasonably fair for all parties.
In contrast, the digital market is grossly immature with parts of it dominated by a few mono-culture corporations that haven’t been around long enough to develop maturity and balance. One, Amazon, takes digital books very seriously, too seriously in fact. Another, Apple, doesn’t seem to take its role in selling ebooks that seriously. It seems to be serving as a sort of spoiler, blocking the rise of someone who might give Amazon some healthy competition. And there are, of course, others who seem clueless, such as the unfortunate Sony. The upstart Smashwords seems to be one of the few bits of good news in an otherwise dreadful market.
As a historian I’m reminded of late nineteenth-century Germany, newly united and newly rich. It stumbled around around European politics for decades, not knowing how to manage its new found power and upsetting almost everyone. By 1900 it was obvious that Gemany was likely to drag the continent into some absurd war triggered, as Bismarck noted, over “some fool thing in the Balkans” (WWI) or as G.K. Chesterton warned in 1932, over a border dispute between Germany and Poland (WWII). Immaturity and power do not make a good mix. As the host of the History of Rome podcast pointed out in a different context, the oldest of his “Five Worst Emperors” took power when he was 24. The others were even younger.
Publishing isn’t like international politics. Its wars are mostly bloodless. But the harm that too much power bestowed too quickly is much the same. That’s a key difference between POD and digital books. Sometimes the old fogies do a better job than the hot young bloods.