Print on demand


Print on demand is a printing technology and business process in which book copies are not printed until the company receives an order, allowing prints in single or small quantities. While other industries established the build-to-order business model, POD could only develop after the beginning of digital printing, as it was not economical to print single copies using traditional printing technologies such as letterpress and offset printing.
Many traditional small presses have replaced their traditional printing equipment with POD equipment or contracted their printing to POD service providers. Many academic publishers, including university presses, use POD services to maintain large backlists ; some use POD for all of their publications. Larger publishers may use POD in special circumstances, such as reprinting older, out-of-print titles or for test marketing.

Predecessors

Before the introduction of digital printing technology, production of small numbers of publications had many limitations. Large print jobs were not a problem, but small numbers of printed pages were typically during the early 20th century produced using stencils and reproducing on a mimeograph or similar machine. These produced printed pages of inferior quality to a book, cheaply and reasonably fast. By about 1950, electrostatic copiers were available to make paper master plates for offset duplicating machines. From about 1960, copying onto plain paper became possible for photocopy machines to make multiple good-quality copies of a monochrome original.
In 1966, Frederik Pohl discussed in Galaxy Science Fiction "a proposal for high-speed facsimile machines which would produce a book to your order, anywhere in the world". As the magazine's editor, he said that "it, or something like it, is surely the shape of the publishing business some time in the future". As technology advanced, it became possible to store text in digital form paper tape, punched cards readable by digital computer, magnetic mass storage, etc. and to print on a teletypewriter, line printer or other computer printer, but the software and hardware to produce original good-quality printed colour text and graphics and to print small jobs fast and cheaply was unavailable.

Self-publishing authors

POD creates a new category of publishing company that offers services, usually for a fee, directly to authors who wish to self-publish. These services generally include printing and shipping each individual book ordered, handling royalties, and getting listings in online bookstores. The initial investment required for POD services is less than for offset printing. Other services may also be available, including formatting, proofreading, and editing, but such companies typically do not spend money for marketing, unlike conventional publishers. Such companies are suitable for authors prepared to design and promote their work themselves, with minimal assistance and at minimal cost. POD publishing gives authors editorial independence, speed to market, ability to revise content, and greater financial return per copy than royalties paid by conventional publishers.

Author's reversion rights

In 1999, the Times Literary Supplement carried an article entitled "A Very Short Run", in which author Andrew Malcolm argued that under the rights-reversion clauses of older, pre-PoD contracts, copyrights would legally revert to their authors if their books were printed on demand rather than re-lithographed, and he envisaged a test case being successfully fought on this aspect. This claim was contradicted by an article entitled "Eternal Life?" in the Spring 2000 issue of The Author Magazine by Cambridge University Press's Business Development Director Michael Holdsworth, who argued that printing on demand keeps books "permanently in print", thereby invalidating authors' reversion rights.