Digitizing your backlist:  POD helps keep titles moving

Book publishing isn’t the most environmentally-friendly business around. A certain amount of paper waste—not to mention power generation—is required to print books, but further waste is a consequence of the returns policy in the Canadian book industry; publishers must print a greater number of books than they expect to sell. Unsold copies will ultimately be returned from retailers to publishers’ warehouses, where they will sit … and sit … and sit.

Not only do unsold books represent wasted paper and a wasted printing expense, they will continue to accrue storage fees as long as they remain on warehouse shelves. According to Brian O’Leary and Ashley Gordon at the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference in February 2010, carrying costs (storage, returns fees, freight) for a title with demand of fewer than 50 copies per year can exceed the books’ manufacturing expense. Publishers are paying more to keep slow-moving books in print than they are paying to manufacture the books in the first place. Financial factors can push these books out of print before the demand for them has completely disappeared.

There are a number of solutions that can help to lessen the environmental waste and extra costs associated with over-printing and over-storage. Careful inventory management and conservative print runs can help, but most publishers strive for this already. An obvious solution is e-publishing, but this isn’t a practical or desirable switch for all titles for a huge variety of reasons, including: commitment to the book as an object of art, books that don’t translate well to e-books, a market that prefers paper books and unproven e-book sales.

Digital printing options allow publishers to maintain in-print status for titles without requiring large print runs and excess storage fees. In particular, print-on-demand (POD) is a strategy that allows publishers to retain books in print-ready digital files, printing copies only as needed (zero inventory model) or in small quantities (structured maintenance of low volume stock).

POD can aid publishers in maintaining an active backlist, filling small orders and allowing for newfound flexibility in printing models. Need a large-print format? A custom coursepack with a new cover page? A special edition? POD can do that. Digital backlist files can even be adapted to breaking content into chunks for new initiatives like encyclopedia entries, online content and mobile apps. If a title is being printed for export, a POD title can be priced on the spot to adjust for currency conversion and ensure fair terms for both publisher and purchaser (how many in-print titles still carry a wildly disparate US sticker price?).

POD is not a substitute for traditional offset printing in most cases. Digital printing technologies continue to advance, but differences in quality between offset- and POD-printed books are still detectable. At over 250 copies per year printed, the economics no longer favour POD over offset printing. As a complement to a traditional publishing model, however, POD fills an important niche. In addition to financial benefits to publishers, books can remain in print indefinitely. Slow-moving – but still moving! – Canadian backlist titles offer immense cultural value and deserve to be kept in print.

Julia Horel-O'Brien | 12/17/2010 | Digital

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