Gene Therapy: Effective Digital Print Strategies

The cost factors to be weighed are:

1. unit cost for print to inventory versus POD;

2. shipping and handling costs in and out of the warehouse;

3. shipping and handling costs for automatic POD fulfillment;

4. impact of time and distance factors on unrealized sales;

5. cost of money tied up in inventory; and

6. balance sheet and profit-and-loss impacts of expensing the sale.

The Best Is Yet to Come
The book industry, in general, has just scratched the surface with digital print. Whether you have a completely integrated system in place, such as Continuum, or have yet to engage, it would be useful to launch an informal set of brainstorming and diagnostic sessions among people in your acquisitions, production, finance, marketing and distribution departments.

Do the gap analysis relative to attainment of your publishing potential in the channels and content areas of your expertise. Where are we now? Where would we like to be? How can digital help us get there, and what do we need to do to make it happen?

For late adopters, it means redesigning your workfl ow system so that print is just one of the media outcomes of your content management system. For publishers with depth of field in front and backlist subject areas, a good content management system will make possible customizing and personalizing your books in digital print for single individuals, communities of interest, institutions and businesses.

These opportunities do not apply only to publishers of cookbooks or travel books, which lend themselves to mix-and-match content. They apply also to literary fiction, biography, history, poetry—any genre that readers may wish to get content of on their ereaders, and then put together anthologies of selected chapters or passages for their bookshelves.

And, for every publisher, the just-in-time, target-marketed outcome is the nirvana of a no-returns, nophysical-inventory global publishing enterprise.