PrintOnDemand

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PrintOnDemand has been used on VanityPress as a synonym for vanity publishing, which it is not. POD is a digital book production process that is used by most academic and trade publishers for some portion of their frontlist or backlist, in addition to being used by vanity publishers because of it's low entry cost.

If done seriously, POD offers you to print a book at overhead costs of about $500. Typically they should offer you ISBN service, inclusion in standard book catalogs/databases and delivery through bookstores at low extra costs below $50. The single copies are of course somewhat more expensive than printed in multiples of 500 or 1000 books in traditional printing processes. Paperback maybe $5-$15 depending on the number of pages. But a small number of books (e.g. 100) may be printable for e.g. $800 instead of $3000+.

Services differ in reliability of production quality *and* especially in reliability of delivery of single book orders.

Note that neither VanityPress nor PrintOnDemand will offer you real marketing. A book will definitely *not* sell on its own.

PrintOnDemand may be a good solution for wiki and open source books, which describe moving targets, have to be updated regularly and so can hardly be printed in large numbers.

I'm not sure what the intent of these pages is yet, so I may be premature in posting these musings, but then I really needed a bit of a break and I do find it quite enjoyable to speculate along the lines of thought started by others.

This (and its related) pages, stike me as being constrained by 'tradition', especially with respect to the use of 'media'.

The caused me to ponder, for example:

Is putting something on the web a truly form of Publishing?
- If so:
  - What are the relative merits of this electronic format as opposed to the traditional paper one?
    - I recall some research that suggested that 'light through' media (screens) are processed differently that those that reflect light (paper).
  - How is posted content protected, via all of the stated modern derivatives of 'copyright', given that google now has more of the I created in its servers than I do in mine Thanks to 'deja vu' and its family tree of archives. (Is possession still 9/10's of the law?)
The Web is generally an instance of a SenderPaysAll? business model, like the world's Postal Authorities (still pretend to be).
- The 'on demand' aspects seem to imply that there is a demand by Recipients, which may translate into some form of Payment to the Author, as opposed to payment by the Author.

-- HansWobbe

Well, I don't know the intent of this page either, but I tried to disentangle it, built certain relationships to topics that might interest people here...

About PrintOnDemand: this is a very general model that is implemented differently by different corporations. The renowned German http://www.bod.de lets the author set the prize which in fact indirectly defines the payments he gets on any book sold. So the authors pays to get it published and into production (usually he'll also order 20-100 books at a much reduced prize for his own needs and marketing purposes). The reader will pay for his copy which includes an arbitrary amount transferred to the author in quarterly payments.

US corporations seem to prefer to set a fixed price (depending on the page count) which includes a constant percentage for the author.

Switching from a traditional publisher-oriented book economy to a new author-oriented book technology, the problems of quality, trust and marketing must be solved. There the OnlineCommunity as a ReflectionCommunity comes in. It could provider beta-readers and editors, quality labels and publicity. If the large corporations and their e-book-greed can be by-passed, then a book economy with much reduced e-book-prices (maybe $0.5-2 per e-book) and occasional PrintOnDemand - to the advantage of the readers and the authors - may become feasible. The OnlineCommunity will play a crucial role in this NewBookEconomy. -- HelmutLeitner

PrintOnDemand

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