Is Amazon Poised to Steal Print On Demand?

Many saw Print On Demand (POD) as the ultimate ‘just in time’ production solution to book publishing, which would wipe out all the inefficiencies of the ‘just in case’ approach that plagues the book supply chain. So why didn’t it happen, or did it happen for some and not for others? Is there a new dawn, or just a new set of people who have been sold a pup and not looked hard at the facts?

Today we read that Barnes and Noble are installing Espresso Book Machines in three of their store, including their New York flagship in Union Square. Books-a-Million also has installed two in its stores last year and Powells has one in Portland. But are all these genuine investment cases or mere subsidised trails? 

   

We are all aware of the huge success Ingram have made with Lightning Source both in the US and UK and the substantial side benefit this has given them with Ingram Digital and in acquiring digital content. Some would suggest that other more single focused operations such as Rowe’s in the UK have been less successful and in general, the main production presses have continued to plough their own furrows. Amazon acquired Booksurge which has now morphed into CreateSpace and has been aligned closely with their Kindle KDP and Audible self-publishing offers. In 2012 Kodak entered into the space with a strategic alliance with Espresso to site POD machine in non book outlets to also service their picture kiosk offer and although two machines were installed in Bartell Drug Stores near Seattle, this apparently has failed to impress Kodak.

In the UK Blackwells installed an Espresso POD machine in their Charring Cross store. There were many mistakes made, with the machine not only taking up valuable retail space, but often being unmanned, as staff wanted to sell books and didn’t want that ‘monitor’ position. The customer also had to often wait, either for someone to operate it, or just for a book to be spat out. Best of all, they had so much faith in its ability to drive sales, they tried to hide the machine around a corner. They didn’t know its audience and it was poorly marketed both within the store and to a wider audience.

The challenge is not the technology, it’s with its adaption and adoption, subsequent return on investment for all and perceived added consumer value. It’s also like eInk technology, in that it looks great and is capable of delivering, but if it takes too long, or the wrong strategy is adopted, it can be overtaken and merely becomes transient technology.

Many suggested that POD would solve many environmental issues but we would suggest that they first may wish to also look closer at the technology and paper stock used in the current machines.

The challenge is that POD means many things to many people.

To some it is a substitute for short print runs. One academic publisher very successfully could predict sales of its back list, so it set thresholds at which POD kicked in and replenished inventory according to forecasted demand and in doing so kept high priced books in stock. It even only had one location worldwide to service distributed hubs and they could afford to fly it around the world once sold. POD can work on predicable sale patterns and high ticket books.

Others waited until the backlist book inventory hit the bottom and operated on sell one make one basis, again ensuring the book remained in stock and obviated the ‘reprint under consideration’ lost orders and print gambles.

Some printed more POD stock than was healthy and used POD to simply reduce their print run exposure and inflated the price to pay for this higher ticket item. Interestingly, ask those POD operators if the print singles or bulk orders first? Also like any machine they return the best investment if they operate flat out and not intermittently between the hours of 9 till 5. 

However, the big challenge for many was the basic model. All tended to stick with the print and distribute model and this was personified by Ingram who printed and then distributed, either on a pick, pack and dispatch direct to order, or more frequently indirect to stock. The real opportunity was to flip from ‘print and distribute’ to ‘distribute and print’ and bring the manufacture closer to the consumer. But to do so one now has to ask what is ‘local’ in a world were delivery is shrinking to same day?

So why do we think that the Barnes and Noble ‘test’ is irrelevant? Firstly, unless the service is perceived as universal then it has questionable marketing advantage and real cost and service issues as there will be more ‘only available at limited stores’ and less ‘available here.’ We don’t envisage a return to the 17 and 18th printer within the shop and the machines are not going to shrink to a desktop today. We do however see it working within institutions and public libraries who often have different needs, service offers and return on investment critique.  

So who could be a winner apart from Ingram? Well this is yet another lesson being taught by Amazon, who, by reducing their delivery times to even same day, have potentially removed the ‘local’ issue. If the can buy online and have it turned around in the same timescale as a traditionally printed book, will the customer care if it’s POD or traditional? Amazon has also gone for the classic sell one make one model that aligns to self publishing and positioned it alongside KDP and their Audible self publishing offers. Tomorrow they are in a great position to now offer the same service to publishers and retailers who wish to reduce stock but increase availability. Maybe Booksurge was a very canny buy and under CreateSpace can become another part of an increasingly well thought through and formidable holistic offer.

A 100,000 Picture Kiosks Don't Make a Digital Summer

The recent news that Espresso Book Machine suppliers, On Demand Books, were to partner with Eastman Kodak and ReaderLink Distribution Services to distribute book production to potentially 105,000 locations was greeted by many smaller presses and self publishing houses with great enthusiasm.  Kodak is reportedly working with On Demand to integrate the Espresso Book Machine with the widely available KODAK Picture Kiosk and potentially provide 7 million titles on the long awaited ‘distribute and print’. ReaderLink open this opportunity further to include some 24,000 retail outlets (drugstores, groceries, etc).

However, since it conception the On Demand model has failed to take off at the direct to consumer end. POD (Print on Demand) has made it mark on the traditional production cycle, helping some to reduce risk with smaller and more frequent print runs and to keep titles effectively in print and negate rights being reverted.  Smaller presses and self publishing ventures have clearly benefited but at has been at a higher unit cost, environmental impact and mainly restricted to monochrome. In essence the market remains one of 'print and distribute' and not 'distribute and print.' The POD market is now dominated by the likes of Ingram and not On Demand who have failed to sell but a small number of machines and make any real market penetration.

Since the Espresso first appeared the digital market has exploded and the impact of this must reduce the opportunity both in terms of genre and consumer appeal. It also assumes consumers will want to go to Kodak locations and not bookstores, which may be achievable but at what cost to the already ailing bookstore.

We don’t know the economic model, pricing and what the turnaround and service offer will be today. but these will greatly determine its appeal and success. The trick will still be to get the machines into bookstores, libraries, schools etc and apart from content what do On Demand offer that others could not do more effectively?

We can’t help thinking this is somewhat of a marriage of convenience between two potential digital 'losers' and just having Picture kiosks in many locations is nothing if it’s the wrong location, wrong price, wrong service offer and its an inferior offer. 

Ingram Reduce The Cost of Colour POD

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.   

  

POD remains a half way print house in a declining print market. 

A Rights Business With No Rights Registry

Many see digital as opening up new opportunities one of which is to identify those old best sellers that have gone out of print and get then back on the shelf. Obviously it would be good to get them on the digital shelf as ebooks and with a relatively low investment they can be up and available competing with everyone else again. Once out there, there is little need to do anything except collect whatever sales revenues occur. The other option is to make them available once again in a physical POD (print on demand) rendition. Again once set up, POD is just a case of collecting the money from the sales, on a book that may never go out of print, needs no marketing spend and may never get its rights reverted.

In somewhat a roundabout way this is where Google came in and is what the, still unsettled, book settlement is about. The problem was never those new works under new contracts that allowed them to go digital, nor those that had slipped into public domain and no longer were tethered to anyone. It was always about orphans and many of this were not completely parentless, but just lying dormant and ‘out of print’. To all those wishing to adopt orphans, ‘out of print’ now offers relatively cheap digital pickings.

Many dispute the orphan numbers and debate numbers and not ethics. Some will assume rights and adopt a ‘publish and be dammed‘ approach always willing to admit an error when found out, but too lazy to do the diligence to establish the facts first.
We write this not as a piece of theory, but as a result of establishing books that were sucked into a trade publishing programme improperly. Some will basically trawl their best sellers that are out of print and readopt them without the appropriate diligence.

So again we ask how publishing is to manage rights in a digital world when it has no registry? How do authors and estates protect themselves from digital tethering and how can authors effectively monitor the situation?

Newspapers on Demand

Travellers at Frankfurt airport can now access the same day editions of some 1,000 newspapers in 38 languages and walk away with their own printed copy from the store. The Print-on-Demand service was introduced this week at HDS Retail Deutschland’s Virgin Media Store in the Shopping Plaza in Terminal 2. In addition the airport operator's VIP service will also offer the service to international guests.

This obviously is a plus for travellers wanting their local news as they travel but it begs the question why not a digital copy download to a USB stick, mobile or laptop? If the POD machine has access to the content it would be a logical step to offer these download options. Such a service could then be widely deployed using the POD and download hub in major airports and stations and the download only in smaller ones.

Today we have access to literally hundreds of major news and newspaper services via apps on our mobile. Although we experience immediate access, we are often restricted abroad due to internet mobile roaming constraints. However, as wi-fi becomes more ubiquitous and publicly available for free, then the logic of buying a POD machine and the set up starts to look more questionable.

eInk Today But Gone Tomorrow?

It now appears that anyone electronics firm standing has created their own ebook reader. Everywhere you turn you find a new one and as we have said many times, differentiating between them is very difficult and even keeping tabs on them is now getting ridiculous. So is this a good thing or a bad one? Does it herald the dawn of ebooks or merely the commodity of technology? As a consumer why would you buy one model and not buy another? Is the device changing the market demand for ebooks or merely flooding the market with readers? Will prices now drop dramatically as competition is forced to slug it out for consumers and the basic technology reaches an economic scale which itself drops the price of the raw material – eInk.

We were asked on Litopia After Dark last Friday what we thought of POD technology and if predicted by some this New Year, POD was finally going to become ubiquitous? Our answer was that a few years ago it offered much and certainly looked the technology to watch, but today it appears to have missed the plot and be past its sell by date. What happened was that publishers merely used the technology to shorten their print run and reduce their risk. Some such as Ingram used it to build a digital repository. Self publishing used it to create low risk publishing. There are many winners such as Cambridge University Press. We failed to shift the paradigm from ‘print then distribute’ to ‘distribute and print’. We merely replaced the press with another more economic one. The channel didn’t change and the economics remained too high to effect change. You can count the number of retailers who installed them on one hand. The likes of public domain, out of print, self publishing who saw POD as their answer to the market may now have a far better solution in full digital. The espresso just went cold and not many people like cold coffee.

So what will happen now with the eInk devices that litter the electronic world?
We hope that the price will drop, not by a few dollars but dramatically and similar to what happened with MP3 player. We hope that all adopt a common standard approach so become interoperable and commodity and stop trying to be something they aren’t. There will be those that believe in their own divine right and push the technology envelope, but the reality is that if they don’t offer something significantly different, the consumer will opt on price and availability. The ones with the most to loose are the likes of Sony, as first to the race can be as much a disadvantage as perceived advantage.

The greatest challenges facing the ‘lookie likies’ is convergence. It hasn’t changed and they now face major wars on the smartphone and emerging tablet front. Some have recognized this an created hybrid 50/ 50 devices with two screens, but the reality is that this costs twice as much in technology and materials and shows the limitations of eInk today. Its like admitting that the technology isn’t up to meeting the consumer needs, but kidding them that two is better than one. By the time eInk goes colour, superior technology such as OLED will have dropped in cost, sorted battery life and become a viable and far more practical offer.

The final challenge is still content and the only thing today that separates one ‘lookie likie’ from another is access to content. Some have started to get exclusive deals to content – ‘we will digitise it but we own it’. Restrictive deals only frustrates consumers, encourage piracy and in a market such as books are dumb. As this becomes access to content increases, then these devices just become even more commoditized. The question is then how big is this segment of the digital market? Will it be overtaken by the online and streaming market? Will devices be less important and access a broader media offer of video, games, music, papers, books, magazines, TV and radio be a greater pull.

Would we as a consumer buy a friend a ebook eInk reader today – we doubt it.

On Demand Overtakes the Rest

We now have more US on demand and short run titles coming to market than those produced by traditional production methods. However, what does that mean and if the trend were to continue, what are the likely implications? Bowker report today that whilst traditional title production fell by 3% to 275,232, in 2008, the on demand titles rose 132%, to 285,394 and the number of titles rose 38%, to 560,626 titles. The rise in on demand follows the record increase of 462% in 2007 and since 2002, has risen 774% in comparison to a 126% increase in traditional titles.

Today on demand is not just about self publishing or keeping that back list alive and is gaining a wider publishing take up. Yesterday was very much print just in case and accepting that ‘extra special print run-on’ to reduce the unit cost. Today is more print in time, producing short print runs with the ability to quickly respond to demand if required. The long tail is getting longer, with more publishers looking at their back list, or to keep titles in print by flipping them to POD and so avoiding rights reversals. The investment is low and has long attracted self publishing authors wanting to see themselves in print. It has also worked well for high priced mongraphs whose sales are low and reasonably predictable. Some such as Cambridge University Press have proved themselves ver adept in using POD to increase revenues.

However, POD has not only helped built the Ingram Lightning Source but also help kick start the Ingram Digital Ventures. The flip from POD to ebook is but a small step and as PDF based Adobe eBooks are still the dominate format, the relationship between POD and eBook will surely grow ever stronger in many ways.

We now see new POD entrants and the production of service neutral files linked to automated formatting and distribution makes much sense moving forward.

Finally will the self publishing model now move online or ebook and away from POD, or will the lure of a printed book still seduce these authors? Whatever the direction the file once created can potentially serve both.

Distribute the Files and Print the Book Locally at Last

The Bookseller reveal that the UK Academic bookseller Blackwell has reaffirmed its commitment to launch the instore Espresso Book Machine on 17th April.

The first machine will be installed as a pilot in its flagship Charing Cross branch on a pilot basis, producing books on demand for customers while they browse the shelves or enjoy a coffee. Blackwell had announced the move last year and many feared that the organisation departures and current climate would have impacted the decision but it clearly hasn’t and it will certainly by one to watch.

The placement within store and the promotion around its launch will be interesting to watch. We would have it in the shop window and in the face of the public but again we probably wouldn’t have chosen Charing Cross as the first store and probably picked Oxford.

The important things are that it is the first real move to a distribute and print model as opposed to print and distribute one and the other is to see the reaction of the public to POD books on the point of access and quality. Some would say that it’s a return to the days when a bookstore always had a press in the back!.

Lightning Sources Strikes 2 Million

Print on Demand (POD) is still relatively new but is now well established in the publishing world. In its inaugural year Lightning Source UK, a sister company to Lightning Source US and an Ingram company, produced some 30,000 books. Today some 8 years later it announced that it had printed over 2 million books in 2008. So what impact has POD really had and what has changed in those few years?

Traditional printing remains more a case of just in case than just in time with the calculation on the print run often being down to economics than hard sales. If you don’t print off a certain quantity you don’t get the price, if you don’t get the price you loose margin or potential sales and then there is always the special deals on offer to print that little extra you didn’t really want.

POD has had some significant success stories and no more so than Cambridge University Press whose program has now passed 11k titles and continues to question those titles that will still continue to generate small sales but would not justify a traditional print run.

But what is the right POD model is it aimed at short print runs, single copy fulfilment, self publishing? Which books suit it best? Is it only economic for textural and greyscale or can it compete on colour?

More interestingly is it aimed at perpetuating the print and distribute model or moving towards distribute and print and offering true local print facilities? If it merely reduces bulk inventory but creates or perpetuates titles stocked, is this merely shifting the cost from bulk to range? The same transport is required, handling will increase and holding more titles doesn’t guarantee more sales. The interesting Blackwell in-store experiment, like the Foyles one before it, has been scrapped and no one has stepped up to providing the community answer. Perhaps their isn’t an effective economic local model and we have to face the facts that we have replaced the big printer presses with new small POD presses, bulk with range and just lowered publisher risk.

The other side of POD is that it has moved the digital agenda forward. Some would say that POD has given Ingram a huge amount of ‘digital’ files on which to fuel Ingram Digital ventures and maybe that is what Amazon saw as the opportunity to replicate with their directives on Booksurge. Digital files can be a real asset when you are building a digital repository offer.

Lightening Source took bold steps, invested and grew to a dominant market position both in the US and UK. Although tradition printers followed, their actions weren’t as bold and their results today are far less impressive. Sounds a somewhat familiar story.

Is it Wise.Com - newprint on demand?

Imagine going into your local newspaper shop and being offered 890 newspapers from around the world, some 81 different countries and 38 languages. Today’s cosmopolitan society can read their own paper, not a day later, or shrunk to a foreign edition, but today and in full.



Sheth, manager of Zyn s News & Cigar on Greenwich Ave. Connecticut has embarked on this interesting print on demand venture last spring. NewspaperDirect, a Canadian company headquartered in Vancouver, puts the papers on its Internet system and then sends them to dealers such as Zyn’s.

Sheth's printer cost $30,000 to $40,000. A printout of a weekday newspaper costs approximately $3.50 to $6, while the charge for a weekend paper ranges from $7 to $10 and are based on the number of pages printed. It takes up to 15 minutes to print copies on both sides and to the paper’s format.

Customers can subscribe, call ahead, request colour and request back as far back as one year.

Given the technology investment and the low cost of the newsprint the capacity constraints and also community demand it makes us wonder at the wisdom of the approach.

Magazines On Demand

So you want to print a glossy magazine and do it on demand?



A start-up called Magcloud is bringing vanity self publishing to the magazine world. Even the smallest organisation or group can their own, professional, full-colour magazine at a cost normally associated with traditional publishing. HP Labs started with BookPrep, a print on Demand service for books and now have created MagCloud for anyone to publish digitized magazines as well as print them, in full colour, on 80 lb paper, with saddle-stitched covers, on demand using HP's Indigo technology. MagCloud accepts PDFs that are 8.5" x 11", and trims them down to 8.25" x 10.75".

It costs you nothing to publish a magazine and 20¢ per page, plus shipping to buy it. For example, a 20-page magazine would be $4 plus shipping which is a flat $1.40/copy (USPS first class mail) for quantities 1-9, or a flat $13 for quantities from 10-100 (per box of 10-100). This may appear steep but it’s not steep for those seeking small niche audiences. Magcloud take the money and even manage the subscriptions!

All you need is to create a high-resolution PDF of the magazine and a PayPal account and you can create, market and sell it at a price of your choosing. The service is currently is in beta and restricted to US shipping addresses, but if it takes off, and given HP’s reach, who knows.

Today it focus is vanity and long tail but when we think of societies, or creating your own wedding and anniversary 'Hello' special. It must have appeal and like POD prices should fall with growth.

The Future is Not Binary - Part 1

Publishing is a diverse and complex industry. Some would argue that it is many industries that have merely been brought together by a common format the book. These industries are diverging as a result of opportunities such as print on demand (POD) and digitisation (ebooks). Some would say that this heralds the end of the generalist publisher and retailer and promotes specialists both in terms of the development of content and rights and their sale to the channel and end consumer. Some may box the different publishing models and predict which will fail and which will succeed in the future. Publishing is and will remain diverse and complex and the one thing that is certain going forward is that there are no silver bullets and that its future is not binary.

If we look at POD, we have to understand that it is about manufacturing, inventory and distribution. We all know that it is not suitable for all, but that it is suitable for many. Its suitability is not always at title level and may even only be at a certain stage in the life cycle of a title. Some have long understood this and have successfully used POD to manage their production, inventory and distribution of their back list, retaining titles that would have been uneconomic to do so in the old model. Some have been able to do this because their rights model enabled them to effectively exploit the sunk cost and move fee based titles across. Many publishers who work on a royalty based model may find that their contract prohibit this approach.

POD is all things to all people. For many today, it represents short cycle print runs and enables them to reduce inventory. To others it is print on demand, sell one make one. To some retailers it offers localised printing and just in time not just in case stock control and responsive customer service. But by itself it is just digital production.

One of the most successful POD publishers is Cambridge University Press, who through their vision have built up a significant POD inventory of some 10,000 plus titles. Has this been economically successful? Yes. Has it been operationally successful? Yes. Is their model applicable to all even within their sector – probably not? I remember sitting down with three major publishers and two industry bodies at the advent of POD. The objective was to look at the systems and process implications of POD and establish the common way forward. The publishers could not even agree then of the definition, let alone the business model and processes.

1Book POD offer

It is always interesting to see new digital offers especially one that potentially can change the way we work and support the existing publishing channels. We have written before about the need to change the print on demand model from print and distribute to distribute and print. Changing the wasteful trucking of books and making the books truly on demand at purchase.

We have also written before about the PSik 1Book™ model D which is PSik’s 2nd generation Books-on-Demand (BOD) system which prints and binds paperback perfectbound books in black & white and colour. The system claims to be able to print an average 250-page book in five to seven minutes and not require a dedicated operator.

PSiK is an Israeli company who have developed the technology and are now showing their latest model at the Drupa show in Germany. Why Drupa and not BEA and LBF? They may believe that the printer is still in change of the print and therefore it is better to align with them but as we have seen with Booksurge and LSI it is the channel that can make or break technology.

The pricing of the model appears to be similar to that offered by the Espresso POD machine but the footprint looks a lot smaller. To see more www.1book.com

All this comes on the day that the UK’s Shadow Minister for Culture Ed Vaizey is reported The Bookseller on his ideas beefing up the role of libraries and positioning them in the heart of the community. At a time when the book budget is the book budget in a library community POD services would appear to offer much.

The Potential Role of Libraries?

Barbara Fister writing in the Library Journal ‘What If You Ran Your Bookstore Like a Library?’ continues to raise the issues of libraries and bookstores in the new environment.

She points out that threat of the superstore of ten years ago has been responded to by the US libraries and they are now offering the same, if not much more. She cites that libraries also encompass a value previously derided and little understood – that sharing books is good. The word ‘sharing’, to many morphs into ‘file sharing and piracy’ with parallels being drawn with the music industries mess and their relentless quest to prosecute all before them in the name of moral right and the law. But Fister points out that sharing is not the problem but could be the solution.

‘The idea of self-immolating books is hard for a book lover to fathom, and avid readers are not likely to be persuaded that sharing books is morally wrong. What’s more, it’s not at all clear that preventing sharing would be good for business. Without the word-of-mouth publicity that comes largely through exuberant sharing, most author’s works would go unnoticed. In any case, sharing is a fact of networked life: used books begin to circulate as soon as new ones are published, through swap and sale sites. There’s no stopping it, short of mass book burnings or a revision of copyright law too horrible to contemplate.’

She believes that ‘rather than learn from the mistakes of the music business, publishers seem poised to repeat them—with restrictive digital rights management (DRM), a sluggish if not hostile response to digital media, and a tendency to ignore consumer preferences.’

Her solutions are to firstly propose a scheme where consumers are offered incentives to buy new books – buy one at full price and get the next one at discount, from anywhere, from any publisher. Her second one is to only rent ebooks on a subscription based model. She says the current situation is like Netflix saying, “Through our service, you can buy a DVD for only half the price of a movie ticket. What a deal! But you can’t sell it, you can’t share it, and you can only watch it on a DVD player that you buy from us for hundreds of dollars.” She suggests publishers could negotiate subscriptions of collections to libraries.
Her third thought is along the same lines that we have suggested before and turns the current POD (print on demand) model from one of print and distribute to distribute and print. She suggests that the community printer could be the library and that we move to a just in time as opposed to the current just in case short cycle model.

We would believe that her first suggestion would be difficult to administer in the current climate but could be offered on a localized or store basis. Her second suggestion is plausible and we believe on line and subscriptions/ rental will become increasingly important as outright purchases of downloads becomes less attractive. The POD community model makes sense with the question of who provides it an interesting one. It could be libraries, academic / campus store or third parties and you can safely bet Ingram are thinking about it whilst Amazon are still honing their delivery service. It makes sense for physical books to be drop shipped locally and electronic ones to be drop shipped remotely but the consumer and the transaction to remain local.

The question is whether the libraries have the vision and strategy to respond.

A New Role for Agents?

The Bookseller reports today on the role of the agent. In a serious twist today they report that the agency PFD is entering a print on demand relationship with Lightning Source which will enable it to bring back out of print works from its authors and estates and makes these available through Amazon and the two wholesaler channels of Gardners and Bertrams.
This clearly throws the gauntlet down on rights reversals and opens up all sorts of potential opportunities for both authors and agents.

By bringing these works back they effectively block publishers wakening up and doing it themselves and also are one step away from securing the full digital control of these works. It is unknown what the deal is with the authors and their estates but it is obviously better than no sales and is with little if no risk. By selecting the free to play channels they also are well place to pick up ‘long tail’ sales.

Interestingly we were only thinking what the role of the Agent may be in the new World. They could hardly remain as they are today and yet unless they step back into the publishing model it is hard to see how many will not be marginalised in the future.