POD Bookstores

I don't know about POD bookstores but I hear there's a bookstore in NYC that caters to only self pubbed books. Ofcourse the writers have to pay like $300 to have thier work sheleved there. . .

Most POD books in my area are sold on consignment basis. Without distribution, you will only see a few copies here and there.

I think it's a great idea. I mean, isn't distribution a bit of a problem with publishing? Not to mention the environmental aspect of putting all those unneeded trucks off the road.

It cuts waste, allows for more selection, and you'd never have to wait for a book that wasn't in stock. It's everything that's good about e-books, but still in book form for those who don't want to read from a screen.

Everything else is changing with technology. I can't see why books should be exempt.

The technology for the POD that James describes does exist-- B&N can do it right now, for selected titles, and they advertise it, at least to those on their email list.

I don't know if the question is CAN it be done but will it be successful? Like so many other changes brought about by technology, this one may catch on and be the way all books are sold in 10-20 years, maybe less.

The people who should be worried about this are the publishers, more than the writers. If B&N and the larger bookstore chains start doing POD in big numbers, then they'll start making their deals with agents, and authors, directly. If I don't need to go to Random House to get my book onto the shelves of B&N or Borders, then why would I? And, if I don't need an agent to get onto those shelves, either (leaping ahead again), then why would I do that?

B&N and those doing POD are trying to cut out the middlemen. If it works well, then it's potentially a good thing for writers. If it doesn't work well, then it's a great thing for those up there with Stephen King. The rest of us will be with the small publishers who will probably stick it out because that's the nature of small businesses...they stubbornly keep on going even when they're told it's a bad idea. (And thank goodness for that, since small business built our country.)

After seeing how drastically the iPod has affected the music industry, I don't think we should count this POD idea out or ignore it. It does have the potential to change the way we publish in the not-too-distant future.

PeeDee said:

I keep thinking of downsides and upsides to it, even beyond those I listed in my comment to the post. I'm just not sure of what I think about ti.

For one thing, I would want the POD books int he store to still be books by authors selected by a publisher. If a POD bookstore allows anyone to upload their books, then that's a lot of chaff to sift through.

But on the other hand (which is what is keeping me on the fence about this) anyone can get their book on Amazon.com with minimal trouble, that doesn't mean they get noticed, or sell. It would be much the same way.

I can't decide for good or bad what I really think about a POD bookstore like that.

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Well, in a sense, it's like that in the real bookstore, too. I mean, I go in, and if I'm just browsing, well, there are THOUSANDS to pick from. If I'm looking in a specific section, still hundreds. If I don't know the author's name, it's just random -- did the bookstore put Book A on display and not Book B?

In that sense, an online/computer searching mechanism might make it EASIER to find a book by an author you don't know. As in, someone puts in "satirical fantasy novels" as their search requirements and Pratchett and Moore and Adams pop up...and maybe a book by Pete and one by Jeanne pops up, too. The book searcher reads the blurbs, says, "I have all the Pratchett and Moore books, don't care for Adams...hmmm, this one by Pete looks interesting, this one by Jeanne does, too. I'll get 'em both."

Is this my latest fantasy short? Maybe. Is it also possible? I honestly think so.

Especially the part where they want to buy your book and my book...that's really going to happen, for sure!

Interesting concept, but I don't think an all-POD bookstore would work.

Many or most book stores take books on consignment and can return for credit those not sold. I don't see why POD books couldn't be supplied on the same principal. Local POD authors are managing to get their books into small book stores by visiting personally and agreeing to take the books back if not sold. This could be done on a national (international?) scale.

I should have read the blog entry first...

Actually, I've heard that BN already does that -- very limited, of course. I could see this as a trend that may actually take off. Each book will be "on the shelf" display copies, much like TVs at BestBuy. After you sample the goods, you can make a purchase. Instead of them pulling one out of inventory in the back storeroom, they POD it and give you a brand new, hot off the press copy. No waste. No inventory. No shelf space wasted. They can stock more books because now the shelves are not used up by multiple copies. Books will always be available (instead of having to wait for the distributors to deliver to store).

It's actually not a new concept. In manufacturing, it's called JIT (just in time). Companies save tons and tons of space and money and efficiency by only make to order, and they streamline the process just to do it. Publishing is only slowly catching on. But the technology is there, and it's not difficult or costly to implement. Digital printing is becoming more and more cost-effective. I don't see why not.


p.s. This is not the same as a store that only sells POD (as in vanity/self pub) books. I think we need to be very careful with making that distinction. For me, going into BN ensures a certain quality standard (not to say all traditionally published books are good) because these books have gone through some kind of stringent process to go for ms. to book shelves. With self-pub/vanity, there's no such standards (a lot of times, no reviews either). A store full of these books with no known authors.... it's like going treasure hunting in the ocean without a map.

The idea as presented won't work.

Go through the story line by line, asking yourself "How exactly will that work?" "How much time will that take?" and "How much will that cost?"

For example: "...at the same cost as a regular printed book." Yeah? How's that work? Remember that instead of trucking industrial-sized barrels of ink to printing plants, you're trucking smaller amounts to thousands of bookstores. Same for paper. Same for cover stock. How's that going to be the same cost?

The presses in a printing plant can turn 24 hours a day, and earn money 24 hours a day. The POD machine is used ... when? And the rest of the time it's just a hunk of metal that cost money, but isn't bringing any in.

POD has no economy of scale.

How much time does it take to print a book? It's got to be non-zero. How many machines does this bookstore have? What's the Christmas Rush look like? What do they do when their printer breaks down?

What need does this address?

maestrowork said:

Actually, I've heard that BN already does that -- very limited, of course.

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To be more accurate, B&N did that. They discovered that it wasn't working for them, so they sold their POD machines to LSI.

Jim has a good point -- economics. Even with distribution cost, etc. offset printing is still so much cheaper than POD. Until POD technologies and material can rival offset, I can see how it won't work.

The_Grand_Duchess said:

I don't know about POD bookstores but I hear there's a bookstore in NYC that caters to only self pubbed books. Ofcourse the writers have to pay like $300 to have thier work sheleved there. . .

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Three

Hundred

Dollars

???????


Let me do the math. Lesseee . . . you self-pub your book, at maybe . . . $25.00 hardback, or $15.00 trade paperback, getting, at best, 1/4 that retail price in return, or . . . oh, let's be generous, $7.00 hardback, $4.00 trade paper, that translates to . . . 45-80 copies sold, just to break even on the deal?

How many bookstores have you been to that will stock 40+ copies of a book by an unknown author?

Dang. I'll go for that in a heartbeat.

blacbird said:

Three

Hundred

Dollars

???????

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That's been proposed before: http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showpost.php?p=130382&postcount=12317

It does sound interesting. I had two reactions upon reading the blog, one negative and one positive. The negative was that I don't want a bookstore that has no books in it. I want to pick the books up and hold them and open them up. I'm afraid that technology will eventually eliminate this to a major extent, though. The positive was the idea that any book would be available right then...that's cool.

maestrowork said:

Jim has a good point -- economics. Even with distribution cost, etc. offset printing is still so much cheaper than POD. Until POD technologies and material can rival offset, I can see how it won't work.

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In any process that can be automated, creating items one at a time will never be as cheap per item as creating large batches. The question is really "will POD become cheap enough to sell books at the same cover price and profit level as the books created by offset printing now?" But the problem with this is that there's no particular reason to expect POD to become cheaper while offset remains the same, and then you're back to the same place: POD is less cost-effective if you plan to sell more than a few copies.

I'm slightly creeped out by the idea of a bookstore without any physical books. The best thing about visiting my local bookstore is wandering around, picking things up, scrounging for used copies that look new, etc. Also, if you're in a hurry, you can grab a book off the shelf, head for the cashier, and be done in time to still read a little before the end of lunch. That's the kind of "on demand" I want.

It's kind of like those video stores where you take the empty case to the counter and they get the actual tape for you.

On one hand, I see the 'green'-ness of it - no more stripped and pulped books, no more discount tables, no more burning fossil fuels by shipping great truckloads of books to stores. I kinda like that part of it. I'm all about green. POD has always had green going for it, if not much else. It also costs next to nothing to keep an e-copy of a book on file.

I also kind of like the fact that the method would allow for more books to be noticed. I'm assuming that getting the 'sample' stocked on the shelves would be by the same process currently employed - buyers selected them for the chains. Publishers send the necessary covers and files to the stores. What happens when a store runs out of covers? I guess that book is "out of stock" for the moment?

All the things Jim mentioned apply too - but I can see how, like with publishers, one blockbuster's income would offset the cost of titles that didn't really sell, and supplies. Income previously set aside to pay for shipping of books could be spent on paper, ink, tech support for machines.

And, I assume, you might be able to save some time if you called or e-mailed your order ahead, so it would be printed and ready to go when you got there. But at high traffic seasons, it might be quite frustrating. How many machines - certainly more than one. That's expensive.

However, I know quite a lot of people go to the bookstore to just browse. To read books, even if they don't buy them. I'm sure they would still have racks of magazines to purchase instantly. But what about manga? graphic novels? Would this POD service apply to them? They would take much longer to print.

I can see pros and cons of both sides - just don't think it's going to happen any time in the Very Near Future.

How this would affect the publishers do business? Would it affect the advances authors receive, do you think?

James D. Macdonald said:

For example: "...at the same cost as a regular printed book." Yeah? How's that work? Remember that instead of trucking industrial-sized barrels of ink to printing plants, you're trucking smaller amounts to thousands of bookstores. Same for paper. Same for cover stock. How's that going to be the same cost?

The presses in a printing plant can turn 24 hours a day, and earn money 24 hours a day. The POD machine is used ... when? And the rest of the time it's just a hunk of metal that cost money, but isn't bringing any in.

POD has no economy of scale.

How much time does it take to print a book? It's got to be non-zero. How many machines does this bookstore have? What's the Christmas Rush look like? What do they do when their printer breaks down?

Click to expand...

Hmmm, much as I hate to disagree with you, Uncle Jim, I think that POD does have a place.

You seem to assume that a POD printer is standing somewhere in a bookstore and just used to print a book a day or something. In reality, these are centralized just as any other printing press. The main difference is that offset printing produces huge numbers of the same book quickly and cheaply, while a POD press can switch quickly and efficiently between printing different books.

Where POD works is where you eliminate the bookstore or warehouse in the middle. The customer orders a book, the book is printed and shipped directly to the customer. This saves on transportation (from the printer to the warehouse, and in some cases from the warehouse to the bookshop) and in theory it also means that there will be no unsold copies that will have to be pulped.

This will become more meaningful in the future. Americans are used to low fuel prices. Mobility is a way of life. But even in the US, gas prices have been rising. Will those huge numbers of books still be able to drive around in trucks so cheaply in 10 years? In 20? It seems that transportation cost will become a major factor, at least it will be a bigger cost factor than today.

It's also not inconceivable that paper will become more expensive. Bear with me here. Imagine that oil does become scarcer. What is one of the proposed alternatives? Bio-diesel. But this requires that a lot of biomass be grown. This will compete with fields used to grow food, wood, and everything else. Granted, paper can be recycled fairly well, but it may still be a factor.

Last but not least, Offset printing has been done for a long time. POD is a new technology. If both decrease production cost by, say, 10% this has a larger effect on POD due to the higher base price. POD will (probably) never reach the low prices of mass offset printing; but it will get closer.

Another criticism I read is "quality control". While it's true that any garbage can and does get published as POD, this doesn't mean that POD is inherently unviable. POD is a printing technique, nothing less, nothing more. I don't see why there couldn't be a publishing house that does exactly what current publishers do, then produce as POD. If they do a good job, consumers would trust this POD-Publishing house just like they would trust a "classic" publisher.

It may even be good for authors in the long run. The largest share of a book's profit is kept by a bookstore. POD is a means to completely cut the bookstores out of the distribution chain. This might mean that even if you move fewer copies of your book you end up with more money.

Time, as always, will tell.

I think this would be a good thing for older books - they could go from 'in stock' to 'on file' instead of 'out of print'. Anything backlisted could be POD'd instead of having to be special ordered.

That could work, although I don't know how cost -effective it would be.

Then there's the always changing technology. What's cutting edge this year is outdated the next - will stores constantly be spending money on new, better equipment? Bookstores barely make a profit as it - that would be interesting to see.

PeeDee said:

Nubling, the theory behind the original article (on the blog) was that the POD machine was in the store and probably customer-used, like punching buttons on an instant mocha coffee machine and getting a cup of liquid.

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Besides, removing the machine from the store means higher shipping costs, not less--it costs more to send 10,000 individual books to different addresses than it does to ship them by the truckload to a handful of retailers.

The first time I ever realised what happens to all the books that never get sold it made me realise why POD, if costs can be decreased somehow, is the way forward. I saw books published (not mine) with a run of say 10,000 where they sold about 150, tried, unsuccessfully, to remainder the rest and then had to pulp them.

A friend had a book published with a small print run because it was specialised non-fiction (1,000) and he told me that in the sixteen years since it was produced he's sold 40. Apparently, they're propping up his desk now because the publisher gave them all back to him. I'm not sure why he's kept them all this time...he promised to send me one but I never received it. Maybe it's not that good.

POD can work well with efficient marketing involving pre-ordering, because then it's pretty clear what demand is going to be. I do think, when you see books that have undergone mass market publication, with huge print runs, that the fact that they still contain mistakes (which can be corrected easily and quickly with digital POD) is another good reason for POD.

By the way, I don't run or work for a POD company. It just strikes me that the old 'print-run' mentality is exactly that: old. It can work because of the lower unit costs and if the publisher knows what they're doing, otherwise it's just another contribution to global warming.

PeeDee said:

Nubling, the theory behind the original article (on the blog) was that the POD machine was in the store and probably customer-used, like punching buttons on an instant mocha coffee machine and getting a cup of liquid.

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Okay, I see, but that is not how POD currently works in the Real World.