Even though The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick isn't selling enough copies to justify a new print run, the sci-fi classic won't disappear from bookstore shelves anytime soon.
It’s not that the title has found a benevolent publisher, but that improvements to high-resolution printing and high-speed binding now make it economically feasible to print just one book at a time. New machines from IBM (IBM) and Xerox (XRX) can print and bind a book in a minute -- and then print and bind a different title the next minute. Publishers are signing up in droves.
"The development of on-demand printing could well be more important than the development of online bookselling," says Steven Schragis, publisher at Carol Publishing Group, which holds the rights to Dick’s stories as well as about 2,400 other trade titles.
He signed up 15 titles for a pilot project with Lightning Print, a new division of Ingram Book Group that specializes in on-demand book publishing. By the end of the year, Schragis expects to have 100 of his titles available for micro-runs.
Lightning Print itself expects to have 10,000 titles in its digital library by the end of the year. Already it has signed up 36 publishers including Bantam-Doubleday-Dell, Chronicle Books, Harper Collins, Oxford University Press, and Simon & Schuster.
The printing machines have prosaic names, like the IBM InfoPrint 4000 and the InfoColor 70, but what they do is pretty cool. One device prints black-and-white pages at a rate up to 464 impressions a minute, eating from a seven-mile roll of paper. Another prints the covers in four-color glory. And the last binds the pages into finished paperbacks. Working in concert, the machines are designed to print up to 1 million books a year.
IBM has the early lead in lining up powerful customers. Ingram Book, the biggest trade-book wholesale distributor, tapped IBM and Danka Business Systems (DANKY) as its partners for Lightning.
"Ingram's base includes all of the major publishers, so it makes sense to bring the advantages of digital printing to these customers," said Jim Hamilton, senior consultant at CAP Ventures, a market-research firm specializing in demand printing technology.
Xerox, long a leader in document-management services, has similar machines. It recently signed up German book distributor Georg Lingenbrink GMBH & Company (Libri) and the National Academy Press for its Book In Time service.
Publishers say on-demand printing won’t be revolutionary for the industry’s bottom line, but that it will keep books in print -- and both authors and customers happy.
Costs vary widely. Lightning charges publishers an average of US$100 to $300 to set a book up in its printing system, depending on the size of the book, whether it has to be scanned in or is formatted in a Quark or PageMaker file. Then it’s $12 a year to store the file, and Ingram receives a deep discount on the on-demand books. It prints the books in its main distribution center in La Verne, Tennessee.
"The real beauty of print on-demand is that the economics are going to get better and better," said Jim Milde, senior vice president of operations and administration at Random House, which set up 24 books as part of the pilot.
But the economics are not that great yet. A book that would cost, say, $1 in a run using traditional technology might cost $5 in a micro-run. The reason for going with the pricey new alternative is that publishers won't have to store books or have their money tied up in inventory.
"You don’t make as much money per book, but you do make something, and the author makes something," said Schragis of the Carol Publishing Group. "And it shrinks the number of books that are just impossible to get."
Consumers would never know that the book they’re buying was made just for them. If the local bookstore is out of Beatrice Small's A Moment in Time, for example, the clerk would punch the order into the computer, zap it to Ingram, and have the book in the customer's hand in two days.
This technology also creates a tantalizing opportunity. A company like Amazon could publish books to order, borrowing Dell Computer Corp.'s business model and causing ripples in book distribution. For that to happen, the cost would have to come down further, and Amazon would have to get the rights from each publisher.
Whatever happens in the industry, the point is that quirky books like Dick's are much more likely to be on the shelf.
