Signing a bestselling author is one way to make money as a book publisher. But bestsellers don't come along every day, so successful publishers are often those able to economize their operations by balancing print runs with expected sales. Print too many books, and you get a cheaper per unit price but end up with warehouses full of dusty stock. Print too few, and you end up paying a hefty unit price when you sell out and have to reprint just a few thousand to fill sales orders.
It's a dilemma that has stood since the invention of the Gutenberg press over 500 years ago. The high setup cost of traditional offset printing makes small print runs impractical and discourages publishers from publishing titles unless they appeal to a mainstream audience.
But with new technology comes a new model. Print on demand (POD) breaks down the cost barrier to small print runs, making book publishing more accessible and cost effective. The digital printing technology reduces the costly and time-consuming pre-production process of traditional offset printing. With POD, a ready-for-print digital file can be transferred directly to a publisher's printer without the need for color separation, films or plates.
Offset printing may be cheaper for large print runs, but POD fixes the cost per copy irrespective of the print run - which means a publisher can print only as many copies as needed. If just one extra copy is required to fill a sales order, it can be printed at the same per unit cost.
"I have no doubt that the advances made in print on demand will radically alter the nature of publishing in the coming years," says Abdul Rahman Azzam, founder and CEO of Bookchase, a British brokerage that matches authors to POD publishers worldwide. "A book will never again have to go out of print just because sales are low. At the same time, publishers can dramatically improve their businesses by unlocking the value of their backlists while cutting down warehousing and inventory costs. What is becoming clear for everyone in the industry is that print on demand provides an extremely viable means of printing books."
Azzam sees immense potential for POD in Egypt and the Middle East region, where annual sales for individual titles may be low, but cumulative sales can be significant. He says the technology will allow publishers to reprint old titles that are still in demand, but for which orders are less than 5,000 copies per year - too low to justify a conventional print run. "Many good, important books drop out of print, and therefore aren't accessible to people," he says. "Print on demand will allow new books to stay in print forever, and important books to be brought back into print."
Significant savings are realized by reducing the overhead costs associated with waste, says Azzam. "Before POD, publishers would have large volumes of copies offset printed and warehoused since the unit price decreases the larger the print run. With publishers sitting on warehouses full of inventory, any financial savings made in printing large quantities are quickly seen as a false economy," he explains. "For instance, [just say] we printed 2,000 copies of a title and then ran out of stock and we noticed that the demand is only 500 copies a year. If we reprint using offset printing we would have to print four years' worth of books. In this case we would incur about 40 percent losses in storage and printing costs... By using digital on-demand printing the publisher eliminates the costs associated with maintaining a stock of unsold copies of a title."
Many publishers prefer to use cheaper offset printing for a book's first run, then follow up with smaller runs using POD to fill additional sales orders. But the opposite approach also has its advantages, as print on demand offers an economical means of testing new titles in the market. Publishers can use POD to make small pilot runs of new books and evaluate the feedback before committing to large quantities using offset printing, Azzam explains. "With POD you can test the market needs and print exactly what is needed... There is no risk."
This is particularly attractive to small publishers and independent authors, who are unable to absorb the financial risk of printing and distributing large volumes of books according to "best guess" sales projections. POD minimizes their risk exposure by allowing them to print in small runs, or only once sales orders have been received. "The POD business model allows small publishing houses, or writers who want to publish their own work, to get the book out there without actually taking the risk of the cost of printing [or] distributing the book in bookstores," says Ramy Habib, co-founder and director of Kotobarabia, a Cairo-based e-book publisher with over 4,000 Arabic titles.
By lowering overhead costs, POD can also help these publishers to expand their markets beyond Egypt. Habib takes the example of a local publisher who has a title on the conflict in Lebanon. "He is an Egyptian publisher, he is small, he doesn't have a lot of [capital], and he doesn't have a lot of resources, but this book would sell [well] in Lebanon. So if Lebanon has [a POD service provider] then this publisher has the ability to reach Lebanon - whereas... his own resources and infrastructure wouldn't allow him to do so."
Moreover, the publisher would not be required to sign over the rights to a foreign publishing house, as it could deal directly with the Lebanese market. As orders come in, books could be printed on POD equipment in Lebanon and shipped directly to the buyer.
Print on demand comes at a critical time for the book publishing industry. With the Internet eating into book sales, publishers need to implement cost-cutting measures that make books more available, and more affordable. But more importantly for publishers, it reduces the cost and risk involved in publishing.
Quality concerns
The jury is out on quality. While some argue that digitally printed publications cannot match the quality of offset printed ones, proponents of POD argue that it may exceed it.
Mohamed Mounir, production color and marketing manager at Xerox Egypt, is one of them. He explains that the intelligent software used in digital printing provides better color management and control over the design of printed documents. "The automation of the pre-press tasks allows for processing multiple tasks with greater efficiency and [fewer] errors," he says. "[Moreover], the machine inspects itself in order to ensure [consistent] color shades for each document in a run."
But a senior executive of a local print house that provides both digital and offset printing disagrees. "Nothing beats offset printing when it comes to quality," he insists. "Although digital printing has a lot of advantages - especially when it comes to immediate high-quality short run requests - it cannot compete with the sophisticated options and capabilities that offset can provide."
He goes on to explain that digital color output is limited by the fact that it is incapable of matching the rich variety of colors that offset printing can produce. "You can achieve results with offset printing that you cannot replicate using digital printing, yet the latter technology is filling the gap of providing relatively good quality in short print runs."
Firm interest in publishing
Print on demand is not only benefiting book publishers, it is also helping businesses to publish their corporate printed materials faster, cheaper and more efficiently. Many local print houses already provide POD services, while larger companies such as Telecom Egypt, Carrefour and HSBC have purchased the equipment to publish in-house.
"The need for print on demand technology emerged as a means [to cope] with today's dynamic business market," explains Mohamed Mounir, production color and marketing manager at Xerox Egypt, a leading supplier of POD equipment. "Any business that wants to enhance its customer communications, get a marketing edge, efficiently develop its products, and process variable data with minimum waste and high production rates can make use of the digital printing technology."
Last minute changes can be made to a company's documents without incurring additional costs. This makes POD more practical and economical than offset printing when doing short print runs involving variable and fast-changing data, says Ashraf El Arman, production operation director at Xerox Egypt. "Customization and personalization nowadays are very [prominent] marketing strategies," says El Arman. "Most organizations in different industries now in Egypt are thinking one-to-one marketing in order to [minimize] waste and ensure that clients will benefit from the marketing messages sent to them."
By using POD, each document and individual page can be tailored according to the client's information. Personal content is more likely to engage and motivate the consumer, says El Arman. Special software allows companies to tailor printed materials, whether bank statements, price lists, calendars or brochures, to their target audience. "For instance, if the computer program identifies the word Dr. or the words Miss/Mrs. in the name field then the machine will print advertisements that are targeted towards physicians or women, [respectively]."
By Deena Omar
© Business Monthly 2008
