Could print on demand, shown in action in this Lightning Source video, be the new mainstream someday? Boosters say POD is catching up with regular printing in quality and speed and price. All but the Clancys and the Grishams may be POD candidates. “Wherever there are books just sitting on a shelf, that’s a problem that we can solve,” a Lightning Source executive tells Calvin Reid of Publishers Weekly. “There will be a tipping point for POD frontlist printing. We can service any print run but those of the largest-selling authors.” Not all publishers would agree. What do you think? Could POD make even more of a difference in the profitability of the publishing industry, near term, than E could?
PW on Lightning Source’s rise: “Walking into Lightning Source’s sprawling plant just outside of Nashville, Tenn., CEO J. Kirby Best recites a list of print-on-demand milestones: Lightning Source has grown from three employees in 1997 to more than 500 today; the company digitally scans about 2,000 books a week and prints 1.2 million books a month. ‘It took us seven years to print 10 million books,’ says Best as we stroll through the 159,000-sq.-ft. building. ‘This year we published 10 million books in the first 11 months.'”
And a reminder: POD is a technology, nothing more. While it’s the new norm for self-published books, including many amateurish ones, good little publishers such as Drollerie Press are also using it.
Related: Via POD you can obtain printouts of books in the public domain, via Public Domain Reprints.org. Some 1.7 million titles are available. I’m trying out the service and will let you know how it works out.
