The Print-On-Demand publishing industry
A New York Times story on how, for $99 to $1,600, print-on-demand (POD) companies offer up to 10 copies of a professionally laid-out book with stock or customized covers and an International Standard Book Number ( ISBN), which is used to identify and list the book by bookstores and libraries. Additional copies are typically 60% of the retail price.
With up to 100,000 new titles published each year, most books fail to achieve significant sales or produce income for their writers, no matter who the publisher is
...The boom in on-demand publishing began, like so many other Internet-related businesses, in the mid-1990s, when the rapidly growing World Wide Web seemed as though it might subsume standard retailing. Traditional publishers wanted a piece of the action. Random House and others invested $15 million in Xlibris, while Barnes & Noble bought a 49 percent stake in a competitor, iUniverse. (Barnes & Noble's stake has since been reduced to 20 percent.) ``We're serving notice that the rules in publishing have changed,'' Richard Tam, the founder of iUniverse, was quoted as saying in 1999.
In fact, the rules did not change. Several major print-on-demand companies are now out of business, while others among the several dozen that remain have scaled back their expectations. ``Our business model is not obvious yet,'' Feldcamp said. ``We don't know if publishing on demand will become an effective outlet for alternative publishing, or just a new variety of a vanity press.''
...Random House has picked up just three to five titles for traditional publishing since it became associated with Xlibris, Feldcamp said. Of iUniverse's 10,000 titles, six are now are available on Barnes & Noble shelves. ``Those titles are meant to showcase iUniverse, not to provide their authors the hope that their work will be distributed in Barnes & Noble bookstores,'' said Steve Riggio, the company's chief executive officer.
Unless authors make extraordinary promotional efforts on their own, most print-on-demand titles typically sell just a few hundred copies. ``A big seller for us is anywhere between 1,000 to 5,000 copies,'' said Kim Hawley, president of iUniverse....
``The POD books that succeed are not the best books,'' Feldcamp said of Xlibris. ``They're the ones that have been pushed most successfully by their authors.''