Books on a Changing Course

Textbooks are bestsellers in the print-on-demand world.

By Darin Painter — Digital Printing: November 2008

Before the fall term at Cornell University in 1995, students in Joan Piggott's "Readings in Classical Japanese History" class went to the campus bookstore and bought her 353-page textbook. This seemed monumental to the professor at the time: During the previous semester, for the exact same course, her book was 40 pages longer.

"All of a sudden, the text was less weighty--and more relevant," recalls Piggott, now a professor in East Asian Studies at the University of Southern California.

The Cornell bookstore had just bought a Xerox DocuTech. The landmark digital device made it possible for instructors to supplement or revise standard texts and replace them with custom ones (often called "course packs"), typically assembled from chapters of previous editions, plus current articles from scholarly journals and newspapers.

Digital short-run printing was in its infancy, but the technology was already nudging traditional textbooks aside. Books could be produced as needed, with press runs as low as one copy. Reprints were inexpensive. By contrast, with offset printing, press runs of fewer than several thousand were economically unfeasible. Inventory was high, as publishers often failed to accurately predict demand. Reprints were costly.

College bookstores with digital printers began returning more unused textbooks to publishers in return for credit. Piggott and her colleagues assumed they were witnessing a ground-breaking technological wave, one that was about to collide with conventional book printing.

What followed was more flop than fervor. For the better part of two decades, advancements in textbook production and distribution were scattered. Worse, innovation was viewed as cool, not critical.

That's no longer true.

Today--suddenly, most publishing experts say--the textbook industry is witnessing an infusion of forces that will mark a sea change in the way educational content is produced, delivered and consumed. Some print firms are profiting from the niche's new realities.

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