POD has not lived up to its expectation. This has been down to a
number of factors, but mainly the high cost of the print and the printers. It
worked fine on high ticket works such as academic monographs, whose price was
high enough to absorb the rise in print cost and still make a healthy margin,
but for standard fiction and reference the price was often prohibitive. The
ebook market then started to become the attractive option for the self
publishing market and why produce physical books that may only clutter up the
garage when you can produce a virtual one that may actually generate sales. Not
many talked about the environmentally unfriendly aspects of POD, but they
remain today. Finally there was the realisation that POD didn’t change the distribution
model to one of ‘distribute and print’, but all too often remained wedded to the
old ‘print and distribute’ one. Forget colour that was just another prohibitive
cost hike.
Ingram Content Group, which has dominated the international POD
market, has now announced a new “standard colour” cost reduction, which makes colour
POD potentially more cost viable. They are significantly reducing the cost price
of a standard 6x9 trade paperback from between $12 - $13.50 to $4-$5 on a single
copy run and to $3 a copy on a short run of 500. A reduction of some 60%!
Ingram are achieving the price
drop by switching to new high-speed inkjet technology which will initially go
live in the US and then internationally next year. They claim that any drop in print
quality through the new technology is very marginal and not noticeable and that
colour could open up a new option to many.
So will this change herald in a
new dawn for the POD market, or just reduce the cost of colour POD and potentially
brighten up some of those greyscale editions. Colour certainly will be
attractive and a 60% price reduction can’t be ignored, but POD is still not
delivering it potential. After all this will not impact the existing POD
business and text based works. POD remains a printer in a distribution hub and
not a printer in a community one. The scale and scope of economics is still
centralised and Ingram are merely replacing the printer of yesterday. It most definitely
will not lead to hundreds of POD community print hubs and it probably will not
impact the high end quality print market.
