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Here you will find just what digital printing on demand is all about.

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Print on demand (POD), occasionally known as publish on demand, is a printing technology and business process in which new copies of a book (or document) are not printed until an order has been received. "Print on Demand" developed only after digital printing began, simply because it was not economical or viable to print single copies using traditional lithographic printing technology like letterpress and offset printing.

Many traditional little presses have replaced their conventional printing equipment with Print On Demand equipment or contract their printing out to Print On Demand service providers.

Many educational publishers, including university presses, use the Print On Demand services to keep a big backlist; some even use POD for all of their publications. Larger publishers may use POD in special circumstances, like reprinting older titles that had been out of print or for performing test marketing.

Book publishing (Publishing On Demand)

Print on demand with digital technology is used as a way of printing items for a fixed price per copy, regardless of the size of the order. While the unit price of every physical copy printed is higher than with offset printing, the average cost is lower for extremely small print runs, simply because setup costs are much higher for offset printing.

POD has other company advantages besides lower costs (for small runs):

Technical set-up is usually quicker than for offset printing.(a PDF file is generally supplied)
Big inventories of a book or print material don't need to be kept in stock, decreasing storage, handling costs, and inventory accounting costs. There is little or no waste from unsold products.
These benefits reduce the risks associated with publishing books and prints and can lead to increased choice for consumers. However, the reduced risks for the publisher may also mean that high quality control is much less rigorous than usual.

Other publishing
Digital technology is ideally suited to publish little print runs of posters (often as a single copy) when they're needed. The introduction of UV-curable inks and media for big format inkjet printers has allowed artists, photographers and owners of image collections to take benefit of print on demand.
Some businesses specialize in POD booklets, catalogs or magazines.

POD Service providers
The introduction of Print On Demand technologies and business-models has fuelled a range of new book-creation and publishing opportunities. The innovation in this space is presently clustered around three categories of offerings

Self-publishing authors
Print On Demand fuels a new category of publishing (or printing) company that offers services directly to authors who wish to self-publish, generally for a fee. These services generally consist of printing and shipping a book every time 1 is ordered, handling royalties and obtaining listings in on-line bookstores. The initial investment for POD services is usually less costly for little quantities of books when compared with self-publishing that uses print runs. Frequently other services are offered also: formatting, proof reading and editing, and so on. Such companies typically do not spend their own cash on marketing, unlike conventional publishers. Some POD Players are focused on serving this author segment. Their offerings are tailored to disintermediate classic publishers (à la Penguin, McGraw Hill). For authors who wish to design and promote their work themselves, POD businesses focus on the low-service, low-cost end of the market.

For authors, the possible benefits of POD publishing are several. They include editorial independence, speed to marketplace, ability to revise content, and greater share of royalties kept compared with conventional publishing.

Conventional publisher use

Print-on-demand services that offer printing and distributing services to publishing businesses rather than directly to authors
are also growing in popularity within the industry.

Ideal to Maintaining availability

Among conventional publishers, Print On Demand services can be used to make sure that books remain available when one print
run has sold out but an additional has not yet become obtainable, and to maintain the availability of older titles whose future
sales might not be fantastic sufficient to justify a further conventional print run. This can be useful for publishers with big back
catalogs of older works, where sales for individual titles might be low, but where cumulative sales might be substantial.

Helpful to Managing uncertainty

Print on demand could be utilized to decrease risk when dealing with "surge" titles which are expected to have large sales but a short sales life (like celebrity biographies or event tie-ins): these titles represent high profitability but also high risk owing to the danger of inadvertently printing many more copies than are essential, and also the associated costs of maintaining excess inventory or pulping. POD permits a publisher to exploit a short "sales window" with minimized risk exposure by "guessing low" - utilizing cheaper conventional printing to produce enough copies to satisfy a more pessimistic forecast of the title's sales, and then relying on POD to make up the distinction.

Ideal for Niche publications

Print on demand is also used to print and reprint "niche" books that might have a high retail price but limited sales opportunities, like specialist academic works. An academic publisher may be expected to keep these specialist titles in print even though the target market is nearly saturated, making further conventional print runs uneconomic.

Many of the smallest little presses, often called micro-presses simply because they've inconsequential profits, have turn out to be heavily reliant on POD technology and ebooks. This is either because they serve such a small marketplace that print runs would be unprofitable or because they are too little to absorb much financial risk.

Variable formats
Print on demand also permits for books to be printed in a selection of formats. This process, recognized as accessible publishing, permits books to be printed in a selection of larger fonts, unique formats for those with vision impairment or reading disabilities, also as personalised fonts and formats that suit the people needs. This has been championed by a selection of new businesses, the current marketplace leader being ReadHowYouWant.

The Economics bit
Profits from print on demand publishing are on a per-sale basis, and royalties vary depending on the route by which the item is sold. Highest profits are generally generated from sales direct from the print-on-demand service's web site or by the author purchasing copies from the service at a discount, as the publisher, and then selling them personally. Lower royalties come from
traditional "bricks and mortar" bookshops and on-line retailers both of which buy at high discount, even though some POD businesses allow the publisher or author to set their own discount level. Unless the publisher or author has fixed their discount rate, the higher the volume sold the lower the royalty becomes, as the retailer is able to purchase at greater discount.

Simply because the per-unit price is typically greater with Print On Demand than with a print run of thousands of copies, it's common for POD books to be much more costly than comparable books that come from conventional print runs, particularly if that book is produced exclusively with POD rather than utilizing POD as a supplemental technology between print runs.

Book stores order books via a wholesaler or distributor, generally at high discount of anything up to 70%. Wholesalers acquire their books in two methods; either as a special order where the book is ordered direct from the publisher when a book store requests a copy, or as a stocked title which they keep in their own warehouse as part of their inventory. Stocked titles are usually also available via sale or return, meaning that the book store can return unsold stock for full credit at anything up to one year after the initial sale.

POD books are rarely if ever available on such terms because for the publishing provider it's considered too a lot of a risk. Nevertheless, wholesalers maintain a careful eye on what titles they're selling, and if an author works hard to promote their work and achieves a reasonable number of orders from book stores or on-line retailers (who use the same wholesalers as the bricks and mortar stores), then there is a reasonable chance of their work becoming obtainable on such terms.

Even though returnability lessens the risk for book stores and helps POD authors get through the door, such authors should also understand that there is only a certain proportion of stock that can be returned.

This difficulty with lack of returns can make bookstores less enthusiastic about POD books. This though is set to change in the future, as the business is currently debating a move away from sale or return altogether, which will do a lot to even things out.

Another problem with print-on-demand titles is the reality that they are frequently debut works. Many book stores are reluctant to take a risk on an author's first, untested work with out the endorsement of a commercial publisher.

Call Print On Demand Limited now for your Print On demand Needs.

Print on Demand Limited. Lower Farm, High Street, Irchester, Northants NN29 7AB
Telephone: +44(0)1933 411159 Fax: +44(0)1933 411906
email: enquiries@podweb.co.uk

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