Print on Demand

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Print on Demand
World of Publishing

One aspect of print on demand which is often overlooked is its eco-friendliness. Traditional lithographic printing uses vast amounts of not just paper, but also ink and chemicals. Each year thousands of unsold books and magazines are pulped as simply too many were printed. While the paper for some of these may have come from sustainable sources, it would be less of an environmental detriment to not use the resources to print in the first place. Print on demand eliminates this problem, since books are only printed when a definite order is placed. Books that are printed have therefore already been sold.

Print on demand with digital technology is used as a way of printing items for a fixed cost per copy, irrespective of the size of the order. While the unit price of each physical copy printed is higher than with traditional offset printing, when setup costs are taken into account digital print on demand provides lower per unit costs for very small print runs than offset printing methods.

While the unit cost of a book or print produced using POD is usually higher than one produced as part of a longer print run, POD does bring some key business benefits: 1) large inventories of a book or print do not need to be kept in stock, 2) the technical set-up is usually quicker and less expensive than for offset printing and 3) there is little or no waste from unsold products.

Among traditional publishers, POD services can be used to make sure that books remain available when one print run has sold out but another has not yet become available, and to maintain the availability of older titles whose future sales may not be great enough to justify a further conventional print run. This can be useful for publishers with large back catalogs of older works, where sales for individual titles may be low, but where cumulative sales may be significant.