As a book author, have you ever experience needing to print a hundred copies of your book in just a few days? Have you ever felt the stress and anxiety of finding a printing company that will do the print for you in such a short time yet at an affordable price? Most authors have probably experienced this. In the past, where modern technologies were not yet available finding the right printing company is stressful already. Added to that stress is finding a print shop who will not charge you more than what you can afford. But thanks to the knowledge and experience of some experts and they are created technologies that can allow fast turnaround of print jobs at affordable prices.
Have you heard of Print on Demand, POD for short? Well, POD is basically a digital printing technology that lets you print a book or magazine and bound it in just a few minutes. The concept behind POD is that the ink is laid to a paper that allows words and images to be printed with amazing speed. This printing technique makes it easy and cost effective to produce books from one copy to thousands of copies. Once everything is ready, your book can be printed ‘on demand’. This means that if someone wants your book, they just have to pay for them and they will be printed a copy. Also, if you want a copy of your book you have to pay for it but you receive a royalty on all other orders.
A carefully produced POD book can have a quality almost the same from its offset counterpart. An average reader won’t be able to tell the difference and know whether the book that they are reading was produced by the offset process or POD technology. Nevertheless, there are still publishers and authors who don’t make use of the benefits of POD and continue to avail of the printing process they are familiar with. This probably because with POD the promotion of your book falls on the author’s shoulder compared to traditional publishing method. The book must be strongly marketed because bookstores would rarely stock them or even offer signings with their authors. People want to read good books, but the marketing tactic must be effective to make the readers aware that the books are available for them to read and buy. Additionally, there are some industry analysts and readers who do not settle for books that are not published in the usual sense. For this reason they do not patronize POD produced books. This problem is also shared by electronic books that don’t include physical copies at all.
But despite the drawbacks of POB publishing, it must still be noted that this publishing technique has functions and features that are not available with traditional publishing. And it must be understood that POD publishing should be judged based not on the technology it uses but on the effort they make in order to produce books that booklovers want to read.