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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