The lines between traditional publishing (with a proper editor), self-pub and just plain printing are getting ever more blurred.
As you can tell by the title of this post, I’m tending to regard them much like a cat who is seeing a new puppy introduced into the household. Is this a good thing? A bad thing? Will it wreck the joint?
On your left is one of the (POD) Print-On-Demand machines you might have seen in a bookstore or library. Espresso is one brand name. It looks like 2 or 3 large photocopy machines side by side.
One part of the machine prints the cover (colour, cardstock), another prints the pages (black ink, white paper), and the third collates and binds the whole shebang.
How they work for you goes like this: you go into a POD-equipped store or library, summon up an electronic version of the material you want, and this big machine will print and bind it in 5 – 10 minutes. Trade-paperback size.
Major use so far seems to be for out-of-print (and therefore, one hopes, off-copyright) titles, and for self-pub titles. But I can see it being useful for printing off a few chapters of a textbook, when you don’t need the whole book and there are no rights issues. When I settle in a do real research, I like to have several books open on my desk. Fiddling around with a single e-reader would drive me mad. (Purely internet research of course would be different.)
The indie bookseller’s (me) point of view: it costs nearly $200,000! No way I have that kind of money. It takes up, what, a good 5ft x 12ft of floorspace just for the machine? Plus walkaround space. Wow, that’s a really big percentage of my total space. I bet Barnes and Noble up the street have one. Oh, shit.
So what do you think? Would you use one if you saw it, and it offered a paper copy of a book you wanted?
What other places have to say about it:
- The Guardian published this article is from 2009, and people are still talking about POD machines’ roll-out, which to me looks like there hasn’t been much action.
- The University of Michigan has one.
- The Economist
- Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) has a good summary of POD pros and cons.
photo: Wiki Commons. Photographers: Dvortygirl
