-- Quick Links -- Contact Us Subscribe Change Address Ad Index Advertise Archive Articles Awards Buyers' Guide Editorial Calendar Editors FAQ Job Board Order Article Reprints Order Back Issues PEAK Awards Print Solutions Weekly Print Solutions Show Submit a Press Release Web Exclusives

Books on a Changing Course

Print-on-demand books aren't novel, but as consumers crave more custom content, their demand is growing quickly. The textbook niche is especially healthy.

By Darin Painter

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.

Mega-Firms Fuel POD Growth
"We no longer hear anyone asking whether there's going to be a digital publishing industry--the market is here right now," says Michael Healy, executive director of the Book Industry Study Group. "Its size and contours are still unknown, but there has been a sizable shift to print-on-demand (POD) books in the past 18 months."

POD has been growing for several years, enabling firms to produce materials quickly and update them easily. In the book market, it allows publishers to forego the common practice of printing a large quantity of books months before a title goes on sale. Instead, they can print copies in response to specific requests from retailers or other customers.

"You can print and bind a 256-page paperback with a cover in less than 10 minutes, which means publishers can replenish their inventory within a few hours, versus going to a traditional printer that might need weeks to prepare the same order," says Albert N. Greco, a senior researcher at the nonprofit Institute for Publishing Research and a professor at the Fordham Graduate School of Business.

The POD book market began to take off in 2005, when Amazon acquired its BookSurge unit. The online stalwart brought color book printing in-house in 2006, when it installed multiple Hewlett-Packard Indigo digital presses at its fulfillment centers. Amazon, which last November launched an e-book reader called the Kindle, is one of the country's biggest booksellers, with a market share publishing experts estimate to be about 15 percent. (The first high-resolution e-book reader, made by Sony, came out in 2004.)

Amazon created more buzz (and controversy) in the POD book market earlier this year, when it delivered a blow to on-demand book printers: Publishers who print POD books must use Amazon's printing facilities if they want their products sold on Amazon.com.

One of the 110,000-plus books available on Amazon's Kindle is "Print is Dead: Books in our digital age," written last year by Jeff Gomez, who challenges authors and publishers to think creatively about the new medium: "It's about the screen doing a dozen things the page can't do. What's going to be transformed isn't just the reading of one book, but the ability to read a passage from practically any book that exists, at any time you want to, as well as the ability to click on hyperlinks, experience multimedia, and add notes and share passages with others."

Further growth in digital books can be attributed to Ingram Digital, which is scanning and shipping books that are included in Microsoft Live Book Search. Once users find content they want, it can be purchased in print or digital formats, thanks to Ingram Digital's affiliation with Lightning Source Inc., a La Virgne, Tenn.-based digital book firm that has printed more than 50 million books for 5,000-plus publishers worldwide since its founding in 1997.

Trends Align for POD Textbook Growth
Greco says publishers and consumers in the "professional" market, which includes textbooks and books about business, law and medicine, are converting to custom editions much faster than those in other book categories.

Distributors and printers targeting the niche say a "perfect storm" of forces has combined to fuel growth in the POD textbook market. Here's a look at those factors:

Advancements in on-demand and inkjet printing have made custom content more affordable--and end users love custom content.

"Give the customers what they want" was the theme at Digital Book 2008, the annual conference sponsored by the International Digital Publishing Forum, held this spring in Manhattan.

More than ever, printing is a buyer-directed industry. Variable data technologies enable publishers and other firms to personalize book content to the reader's specific needs. Customization and personalization are paramount to end users, who seek more control over when, where and how they order and consume content. With digital printing, every page can be different, which means professors can customize textbooks for each class.

Currently, digital presses account for only 2 percent of printed book pages, or $8 billion annually, according to Book Industry Trends 2008. That share is expected to triple in the next three to four years as quality and speed improve.

As custom content becomes more prevalent, book sellers are shifting from "horizontal marketing" (targeting all consumers with books on all topics) to "vertical marketing" (targeting specific market segments). A prime example is Borders' new concept stores, which create real-life portals for cooking, travel and other vertical segments. (See sidebar below.)

Also, new inkjet printing technology is making digital printing competitive in price and quality with offset printing. Several large firms, including Hewlett-Packard, Kodak and InfoPrint Solutions (the joint venture between IBM and Ricoh), showcased inkjet advancements this spring at the drupa 2008 world print fair in Düsseldorf, Germany.

Short-run production ensures that firms won't lose potential sales due to out-of-stock situations or excess inventory.

Changing content is a constant in educational, technical, legal and business subjects. Using traditional printing, publishers often house excess inventory that typically is built into the selling price of the book. Alternatively, on-demand production allows for up-to-the-minute revisions with little or no inventory obsolescence.

Feeling empowered, students no longer feel they have to pay exorbitant prices for textbooks.

This year, the number of new college textbooks sold by American publishers will drop for the third year in a row, according to Book Industry Trends 2008. But revenue brought in by those books will rise for at least the sixth consecutive year, sustained by continuing price increases. The result has been backlash among students. (See sidebar below.)

The high prices of textbooks--about $950 per year for an average student, according to the Student Public Interest Research Group--have students and their professors seeking alternatives. "More professors seem to be growing increasingly sensitive to students' price concerns," Greco says.

One result has been an increase in the number of commercial publishers offering digital textbooks. An example is Flat World Knowledge, which next year plans to offer free peer-reviewed, interactive, user-editable textbooks online. The books will include images, audio and video, and will be structured as "social learning" sites, meaning students can chat and share notes while reading. (Some students are still in favor of traditional books, despite their prices. Unlike digital music or video, digital books require consumers to change their consumption habits. Mainly, reading on a screen is still more difficult than reading printed pages.)

Flat World hopes to leverage the availability of these free books to make money by selling materials that supplement the online texts, such as study guides or print-on-demand hard copies. The firm also will take a cut of sales of user-created study material sold through the Flat World website.

Colorado Firms Enable Personalized Publishing
For most of its 100-plus-year history, printer National Hirschfeld LLC produced monochrome textbooks for a variety of clients in its 167,000-square-foot facility in Denver.

In late 2007, the company's president, Brett Birky, received a call from one of his top customers--a large publishing firm that sells textbooks to college bookstores. The client sought an efficient way to enable professors to tailor their texts by choosing only the chapters and other copy that aligned with coursework for each class.

"Inventory is a big issue for publishers," Birky says. "They constantly attempt to determine overall production runs, and often either have to come back and print more books, or find a place to store unused ones." The client's message to National Hirschfeld: We'll give you significantly more business if you can make, bind and distribute high-quality, color POD books.

Birky and Steve Wilson, the printer's vice president of sales and marketing, were versed in conventional offset printing, but recognized the need for National Hirschfeld to evolve into a digital solutions provider. At the time, they wanted to penetrate the 4-color digital market, and had planned to invest in an inkjet solution that could enable that transition.

To that end, National Hirschfeld installed an InfoPrint 5000 color printing system earlier this year from InfoPrint Solutions, Boulder, Colo. The machine utilizes drop-on-demand inkjet technology--it only "jets" ink when it's needed on the paper, so ink is never recycled or reconstituted--and includes technology that drives multiple Adobe Postscript RIPs to expedite job completion.

Today, professors at several colleges and universities work directly with the publishing client's online storefront ordering system to select specific content (chapters, sections of chapters, illustrations, etc.) for their books. When profs finalize their orders, the publisher's system creates a file that's sent directly to National Hirschfeld's InfoPrint 5000 device. National Hirschfeld then binds and distributes the versioned books to the publisher within days.

Wilson says that process is far more efficient and empowering than the way it updated books for professors--by "rebinding" them in a process that involved pulling off covers and spines, printing updated material, inserting that material back into the book and providing finishing services. Because POD textbooks are always current and relevant, National Hirschfeld's customers have limited obsolescence, thereby increasing profits.

"What we're really doing now is managing the distribution of images," Wilson says. "That's the business we're in. Publishers are trying to present innovation to customers, and we're allowing them to adjust their product for their consumers." In addition to the POD book market, National Hirschfeld uses the InfoPrint 5000 for the production of direct marketing, catalogs and other products.

"Personalized publishing is the next big thing in the production print space," says Chris Reid, director of global solutions at InfoPrint Solutions Company. "We will see individualized versions of much of the hard-copy printed content on the market today, from newspapers, car manuals and travel guides to the high-end textbooks National Hirschfeld provides."

Darin Painter, a freelance writer in Cleveland, is a former managing editor of Print Solutions. Send comments to
editors@PrintSolutionsMag.com.