The spread of the Internet has made more books available to more people than ever before. How to take advantage of that development was the theme of last week's BISG seminar, "How to Make Information Pay." "The Internet is the ultimate bottleneck buster," said Chris Anderson, editor of Wiredand author of the forthcoming The Long Tail(Hyperion), whose thesis is that in the future companies will sell fewer copies of more items.
While some experts have argued that too much choice will result in less consumer satisfaction, Anderson maintained that with the proper filters, more choice will lead to more sales. Technology can expand consumption, Anderson noted, pointing to the increase in listening to music with the advent of the iPod. He noted that while sales of music CDs have fallen, there is no lack of demand for music. The question, he said, was how companies can monetize that demand. Anderson argued that the Web promotes reading, though not necessarily of books. He said he thought it was encouraging for the book industry that sales of used books has doubled, the growth of POD/self-publishers has exploded and purchase of niche titles online has grown significantly. While those developments may be positive ones for consumers, they are not necessarily good trends for many traditional publishers.
Selling fewer copies of more items is certainly the idea behind print-on-demand publishing, and Lightning Source CEO Kirby Best and Cambridge University Press director of worldwide distribution Ian Bradie gave a couple of firsthand accounts of the growth of POD and ultra-short-run printing. Lightning's volume increased from six million units in 2004 to just under nine million in 2005; the company is now doing about one million books per month, Best said. The average print run is 1.8 copies and 81% of its titles are priced between $9 and $25.99.
The largest volume is generated by traditional book publishers, which accounted for 59% of units in 2005, while authors' services (iUniverse, etc.) accounted for 38% of units. Content aggregators accounted for the remaining 3%. Best said that with the On Demand Machine Corp. patent lawsuit behind it, Lightning is looking to expand the number of plants it operates both in the U.S. and abroad.
Bradie is an unabashed fan of Lightning's ultra-short-run program. Since CUP began incorporating short-run printing into its business model in 1998, it has generated $30 million in sales from the program, $9 million in 2005 alone. Books in the program sell, Bradie said, even though CUP does not market them, but does keep their bibliographic info up to date. The press moves books into the short-run program when annual sales fall below 250 to 300 copies. The use of ultra-short-run has significantly cut the number of titles that CUP discontinues annually, Bradie said.
