O'Reilly Network: Small Print Runs

Published on O'Reilly (http://www.oreilly.com/)
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/ask_tim/1998/small_print_runs.html
See this if you're having trouble printing code examples

Date: Oct 1 1998
From: James Hunt
To: ask_tim@oreilly.com
Subject: Small Print Runs

Tim,

You often talk (implicitely) about the unfavorable economics of small prints. But have you looked into the terrific print-on-demand technology recently introduced by Xerox and IBM? See for instance this URL for more details: http://www.wired.com/news/news/business/story/13003.html

Regards,
-- J.H.

James,

We actually got a demo of Lightning Print at Ingram some time ago. It does a really stellar job of printing books. The books are indistinguishable to the untrained eye from books printed on regular presses. We plan to use it for some low-volume titles, but at the moment, there aren't many titles that we've taken out of print just because they are low volume. When we have (as with the book MH and xmh), we have often made the source code available online, so that people could print their own copies.

One of the things that Lightning Print doesn't solve is the "marketing shelf space" problem. While virtual inventory is infinite, the space in a publisher's direct mail catalog, or on the price list presented to bookstores, or in the advertising budget, is not. So while it means a book can remain available forever, this isn't all that different from what happens to many books today. Go to many publishers' warehouses (especially smaller publishers), and you'll see rack on rack of books that have sat untouched for years, kind of like the endless warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The article you referenced used Philip K. Dick as an example of an author whose work could continue to be made available. But you have to remember that mass market science fiction books are typically printed in runs of 50,000 copies or more, and not reprinted unless they sell close to that number. The average computer book can be profitable at a run an order of magnitude smaller. Many university press books are printed in runs of a thousand at a time.

So what this technology does best is preserve access to books that would normally be printed in very large print runs, but that can't sustain that.

Anyway, I do think this is an interesting technology, and you'll be seeing more of it.

--Tim