Just-in-time printing

Lifestyle/Technology: Print on demand gains favor | Susan Olasky

When Scott McClellan's memoir of his days as Bush press secretary became a surprise bestseller and publisher Perseus ran out of books, it turned to Lightning Source, a print-on-demand (P.O.D.) company. Lightning Source president David Taylor told Bookbusinessmag.com, "We got the file from them on the Monday morning . . . and we were printing the first books that afternoon. . . . We actually moved over our entire casebook production to just that book for a period of 48 hours. We printed several thousand copies, and those were orders that otherwise would have just [been lost] or would have not been fulfilled."

Up to now P.O.D. has focused primarily on self-published books, but technological improvements suggest that mainstream publishers may increasingly rely on it to fill in gaps and avoid overprinting titles. P.O.D. allows anyone to get published and put out a book that at least looks good: According to Books In Print publisher Bowker, traditional publishing was flat last year, with 276,649 new titles and editions printed (up only about 2,000 from 2006), but with 134,773 P.O.D. titles (a five-fold increase from 2006). Many of those titles are reprints of public domain items, but many are also short runs of self-published books.