Print on Demand Workshop from Day One

There was a great session on Print on Demand yesterday. Here are some quick notes:

Ingram's POD service, Lighting Source, shared these stats from their service:

500,000+ titles available
14,000,000 printed thus far
1.3 million printed each month
average print run - 1.8 copies

Coming from a manufacturing background, I tend to take some things for granted and Phil Zuckerman from Applewood Books made a great point:

Price and content are important, but what really matters to resellers is availability.

The constraints of large press runs in offset publishing play havoc with decision-making. Traditional printing still makes sense in many instances, but the folks who are combining it with POD are finding a whole new set of possibilities around how to manage inventory.

Cambridge University Press has brought back to life thousands of titles and have doubled the revenues from their backlist over the last ten years.

Knowing when and where that will come from is hard to say, but again that is the beauty of POD. At Cambridge, they had a little over 1400 titles that did not sell in 2005 that went on to sell $1.5 million in 2006. These were all incremental sales not possible in the past.

There is also an angle that allows for quick updating of books.