"Just In Time" Publishing With Print On Demand Book Publishers

Educational Math Software
Learning Mathematics With Educational Math Software

"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.