| � PRINT ON DEMAND IS HERE |
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Bookshops are not places you would normally associate with the cut and thrust of technology innovation but in their own quiet way they will become just that over the next five years, as digital technology enhances the way books are manufactured, sold and consumed. But whatever the pitfalls of replacing a simple, efficient technology with a complex and expensive one, the distribution and manufacturing process behind paper-based books can be wasteful and inefficient, which is where publishing on demand comes in. Although people have been talking about it for years, companies have only now put the building blocks into place for a viable business model. Europe, Scandinavia and the Far East are experimenting with it while the UK is kicking off large-scale projects in bookstores-cum-publishers such as www.writersworld.tv. The most visible sign here may be your high street shop compiling and printing you a personalised book while you put your feet up and have a coffee. But there are other benefits. The key to POD is recognising that publishing has been digital for as long as there have been word processors and desktop publishing. In other words, once publishers have digitised and laid out a text, it exists for as long as the disks it is stored on exist, regardless of whether that text is ever made into a book. It can be reproduced in any form, and distributed online and worldwide for next to nothing. POD at its simplest means using digital library technologies such as those associated with IBM�s DB2 database, together with digital print-and-bind technologies to make a physical book only when customers order it. IBM�s digital library facility with DB2 works like a cash point, only you withdraw fully licensed and secure content from it rather than cash. |
But for paper-based books specifically, POD opens up a world of possibilities and solutions to age-old problems for those publishers who see it as a licence to print money. One of paper�s unique strengths is also its greatest weakness - it decays. While a Harry Potter or a Delia Smith can be piled high and sold cheaply and quickly, a first novel in paperback, or a promotional tie-in with this year�s boy band may lie in tomorrow�s warehouse full of unsold books. If you have a book you wish to publish please go to www.writersworld.tv We have just concluded a deal with an American based Print on Demand publisher which would not only make your book available as a Print on Demand in the UK via Bertrams (wholesaler to the retail trade), Amazon and Cypher, it would also make it available through the biggest book distributors in the United States - Ingrams and Baker & Taylor. If the book is ordered in the USA it would be printed and distributed there. �
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