What exactly is a POD Press?

Under it all there is a type of press that can make a single book as you need it, albeit at a slightly higher cost. The main provider of this service is Lightning Source.

Any publisher might use this for very short runs, niche books or backlist. But very small presses generally have to use it for all their books because they can't finance a full print run and warehousing.

A literal POD press would only make a book when it was ordered.

Not necessarily. For instance, if you wanted to self-publish, you could spend money by contacting a local press and asking them for their print run costs. Maybe you want 5,000 copies of your book and you're going to sell them at fairs and whatnot. That would not be POD (Print on Demand). With POD there are no physical books sitting in a warehouse anywhere, the books are printed one at a time when they are ordered. That doesn't mean you can only order one book, but the machine only makes one book at a time and it makes a complete book, then another book would be printed. The costs are higher per book.

It is very possible that a small press might make a print run of 1,000 copies of a book (or some other number) if they have a place to store them, have distribution, have a marketing strategy for said books, etc. They also might use POD by using Lightning Source. When an order is placed, they contact Lightning Source to fill the order for them and ship it out. The publisher would never actually see the copy of the book.

A print-on-demand book is one that is only printed after an order is received.

These are generally digitally-printed books, but you could use any technology: e.g. letter press; linoleum-block, or monks-with-quills.

MysteryRiter said:

Thanks so much! So if a publisher has their books available at only all the major ebook/book retailers such as Amazon, B&N, Apple, etc. they are a POD Press?

Click to expand...

I also wanted to say that generally, a publisher that is only selling books via POD on those sites should be looked at with extra scrutiny. There are many small publishers out there who are very bad ideas who use this model and it's not particularly profitable. Ebooks might sell well on Amazon alone, but POD books are priced higher than their other print counterparts and a lack of bookstore presence severely impacts sales.

This is a little different from an epublisher also offering POD copies in print or having both available. That doesn't bother me and I think is actually a good idea, but if you're looking at a publisher that only sells online, make sure you read all the bewares threads here and check P&E to make sure you know what you're getting into. That's obviously always true, but in this case even more so than usual.