“Just In Time” Publishing With Print On Demand
Book Publishers
“Just In Time” Publishing With Print On
Demand Book Publishers
Print On Demand book publishers are companies that print books
based upon a current order total. They do not print books
unless there is already a demand for the books. There are
a number of advantages and disadvantages to using print on
demand book publishers.
First, in general it is cheaper and more
efficient to do massive printings of books at one time.
There is no need to deal with multiple small shipments.
There is no need to continually change the shipments of books,
change the order quantities, and change the printing
operation. Although print on demand book publishers are
more than well designed to handle quick changes in print
requirements, these companies still can not match the
efficiency and speed of massive printing publishers.
However, the print on demand book publishers
save money by ensuring that each book they print will be
sold. Many times there are hundreds of thousands of books
that remain unsold for many years. These books represent
a large quantity of lost profit for the massive quantity
publishing companies. The companies lost money in the
material cost of the book, as well as the cost to display the
book, and the cost to ship the book. These costs normally
are taken by the consumer when he/she buys the book, but when
the book sits on the shelf, these costs accumulate and hurt the
publisher.
Print on demand book publishers tend to work
with smaller authors. These companies can not deal with
huge bulk orders and tend to keep to smaller
distributions. They do not charge ridiculous amounts of
money for their services, however the quality may be lacking in
the printing compared to a larger publisher.
Print on demand book publishers are normally
used by self publishing authors. These publishers are not
able to handle huge volumes at once, but are designed for
smaller orders. If an author thinks that he/she will
start to become too large for a smaller order system, they
might wish to move to a regular publisher. These print on
demand book publishers are good for special versions of a book,
targeted versions of a book, or just small orders. They
are generally cheaper and easier to access for a self
publishing author than the time it would take to go to a large
publishing company. These options should be used if an
author can not find a publishing company to take his/her book,
or if the author knows that the audience is a small subset of
the population.