Digital Printing
“If [Perseus] had set the book up as a print-on-demand book at the time they published it, we could have printed probably several thousand [more],” Taylor says. “There was a gap of three to four days when they were out of stock, and we didn’t have the file.”
Such a setup gives publishers the flexibility to print fewer books initially, reducing the risk of overstock and the associated cost of returns, shipping and warehousing. This hybrid POD-offset model is increasingly being adopted by traditional book publishers who still rely primarily on offset, Taylor says, citing such Lightning Source customers as Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Random House and Elsevier, who are using POD to keep already-published books in print.