Everything is Upside Down

It's all about the supply chain

Print on Demand, or POD, is a handy service that, as the name makes clear, prints books upon demand. You load files, and then, when an order comes in, the book is printed and shipped. It costs more per unit to use POD, but, for a small publisher, you won’t have a huge printer bill to pay, and it takes away the stress accompanied by ordering an initial print run for a book (“this will definitely sell 10,000! you say, in 2016, and then, in 2020, still have 9,000 books slowly decaying in a warehouse.) POD is great for university presses, whose titles often have small print runs, and it is handy for the Big Five (and all of us) when a book suddenly takes off, outstripping that initial print run, and you need to get copies to the market quickly. For self-publishers, it’s golden.

But there are downsides to POD. Some publishers refuse to use it, because the printing quality is lower than with offset printing. (This is true, but POD technology continues to improve, shrinking the difference.) …