I found this a confusing term when Publishing Perspectives used it in the headline for Richard Chaikin’s latest post. Mr Charkin’s post claims to describe the transitioning of his Mensch Publishing to a “wholly digitally-driven model”. I assumed, as I started to read, that that this meant that all Mensch’s books would henceforth be available only as ebooks. It doesn’t mean that at all. It focusses on the print side of the operation, telling us that from now on their physical books will only be available as print-on-demand books, stored digitally at the printers, and printed out only when a customer orders a copy.

To me this is the way any small publisher should handle manufacturing. Don’t print lots of copies and then have to figure out where you’re going to store them. Don’t print any: just set the digital files up and after you’ve received an order print the number of copies called for. Sure your unit cost will be higher, and thus your margin less — but you won’t have to pay any bills for warehousing, or the cost of capital tied up in inventory, or face the need to waste books that don’t sell. It may not balance out precisely, but together these moves should make for a viable small company.

Mr Charkin informs us that bookstores are reluctant to stock print-on-demand books. If this is true, (and I find it hard to know how the book buyer would know which books were POD and which were not) it’s the result of overly apologetic marketing by the publishers. In the early days of print on demand, old books had not been created from electronic files: they had (mostly) been typeset at a composition house, and one clean pull of the type would have been photographed and used as an original for offset printing. Print on demand technology was first used in reprinting books which didn’t sell many copies and this meant that when we came to do a print on demand version a digital original had to be created. This was done by scanning a printed copy of the book. Scanning isn’t a faultless technology, but worse, nor is offset printing, and many of the printed copies used for scanning were embarrassingly poor reproductions. Result: the POD version was a poor reproduction too; and people noticed. Years ago Oxford University Press used to print a cringe-making line on all their POD books — something to the effect that they apologized for the lousy printing, but did it so that valuable material in low demand could nevertheless be supplied to scholars. Now, if you are a bookstore owner and are confronted by such an apology, I think it absolutely reasonable that you would refuse to “represent” the book — let any devoted scholar get it from the publisher direct.

But of course all the old books have pretty much been taken care of now — and none of Mensch’s would have been in this category anyway, as the company didn’t exist in the bad old days of analog production! Yet apparently we are allowing booksellers to maintain the false idea that POD = substandard. Exactly the contrary, as Mr Charkin admits — POD’s digital printing, from a proper file, will probably actually yield a superior image to that which we could have gotten from offset — even, be it noted, when it comes to a halftone or a color image. In fact, refusing nowadays to countenance a book printed by POD makes precisely the same amount of sense as refusing to countenance a book because it was not typeset by an old-fashioned typesetting house.

So, don’t shout from the rooftops that you are changing to digital printing (most of the industry is too anyway) as if it were something in need of explanation or worse justification. Just treat the books as books, and when a bookstore orders six copies, print them six copies — when they get them they’ll be none the wiser. Actually, what’s wiser would be their appreciating that print quality has nothing to do with content quality — and even if it did would now be impossible to distinguish.