Let others wax nostalgic about their seasons of the witch, their winters of discontent. For us, the summer of 2008 will go down in publishing history as its own kind of water shed: call it the summer of POD. It all started, fittingly, right after Memorial Day—BEA weekend, in fact—with the publication of Scott McClellan's recovered memory of his time with the Bush administration. Published May 28, McClellan's What Happened? immediately began flying out of the stores, but within days, publisher PublicAffairs, having underaccounted for the value of controversy, found itself with a luxury problem: a book that everybody wanted but which was out of stock. Solution: PublicAffairs founder Peter Osnos sat down with Lightning Source and struck a deal to publish 7,500 POD versions (in hardcover, which is a bit unusual) to tide readers over until more of the traditional, offset version could be printed and shipped.
Cut to: early August. Vermont-based indie Chelsea Green wanted to get its pro-Barack title, Robert Kuttner's Obama's Challenge, to conventioneers in Denver; publisher Margo Baldwin made a controversial move by using Amazon's BookSurge as her POD supplier, which meant that the title, initially, could be bought only through Amazon. Many booksellers took umbrage at the suddenly “unlevel” playing field. (Baldwin had initially approached both BookSurge and Lightning Source, but Lightning Source was not able to produce and ship the titles in time; since the brouhaha, Lightning execs have apologized to Baldwin.)
Two weeks later, the nation and tiny publisher Epicenter Press were taken by surprise when Sarah Palin was picked as John McCain's running mate. Having just shipped the last of his 10,000 copies of the April title, Sarah: How a Hockey Mom..., publisher Kent Sturgis turned to, yup, POD. Lightning Source to date has produced 51,000 copies, while Epicenter awaits a 25,000-copy shipment from the traditional book printer. (Interesting side note: Overlook Press wanted to print its Can a Catholic Support Him? as POD to get it to delegates at the Democratic convention, but found it was even faster to use a traditional Denver-based printer.) And now, with Perseus this week giving a name—“Constellation”—to its digital initiative on behalf of its publishers, might we have reached a tipping point?
I understand that there are issues that still bother traditional publishers, like what to do about a POD book always being more expensive to produce than a “regular” offset one. To that I say, consider this: as the bestselling PublicAffairs/McClellan example proves, it's probably better for a publisher to take the reduced profit on an immediately available POD title rather than risk that the public losing interest in the two weeks it could take stores to restock traditional versions. Besides, when you factor in the cost of returns, you almost always will win by printing on demand.
So why, then, has traditional publishing been so slow to embrace POD? Maybe, let's face it, because it carries the whiff of self-publishing, something corporate book folk both fear and disdain. And maybe because there is still value—psychological value, but that counts—in consumers seeing stacks of a title in stores, stacks of the book, the one everybody must have. Or maybe the reason is simpler: POD is new and different, which translates to misunderstood.
In publishing, as in politics, it just might be time to embrace change.
Agree? Disagree? Tell us at www.publishersweekly.com/saranelson
