The Mark 2010

Print on demand supplies books almost instantly while lowering costs, allowing local bookstores to compete with the Amazons of the world.

It seems like we’ve been at the tipping point between traditionally printed books and digital books for over 10 years. Looking around the industry, you’ll find naysayers who continue to stick their heads in the sand, believing that digitization couldn’t possibly happen to books, as well as those who believe it has already happened and that if you’re a publisher or bookstore that still doesn’t have a “digital” strategy it’s already too late for you.

Let me pause to let you know where I personally stand.

I am a book nerd, a lover of the printed and bound icon brought about by Gutenberg and continually improved upon over the centuries. Will I always love books? Definitely. Will I migrate my consumption of reading to digital formats? I already have.

Despite the fact that I collect and cherish books, and my livelihood as a bookseller currently depends upon the sale of printed books, most of my own reading occurs digitally and has for years.

This article was written to be consumed digitally rather than in print. And while stats show that less people are reading books than ever before, there has never been a time in history in which so much is being read by people who would never pick up a book. It’s all happening directly on websites, through email, RSS feeds, and via portable devices like smart-phones and e-readers.

Think about your own reading habits. Even if you are passionate about books, add up how many hours a day you spend reading email, online articles, websites, instant and text messages, watching videos, and listening to podcasts or other digitally-born materials. Now compare that to how many hours you spend reading a printed book. Surprising, isn’t it?

So, where, then, does that leave publishers and booksellers?

In my opinion, at a very desirable place – and here’s why: Digital does not mean the death of print. There are many examples I could cite, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll stick to the one I am most familiar with – print on demand.

Print on demand is not new but, recently, it has been growing dramatically. According to Bowker, of the over half a million new titles published in 2008, 285,394 of them were produced using POD, while only 275,232 were printed conventionally. This is an example of digital not killing print, but rather redesigning the landscape and giving it a new life.

In 2007, the University of Alberta bookstore became the first in Canada and the fourth location in the world to install an Espresso Book Machine. Manufactured by On Demand Books in New York, the EBM is a fully integrated printing and binding machine that can produce a perfect bound trade paperback from digital files that is virtually indistinguishable from a traditionally printed book. Today, more than 15 other bookstores around the world have this technology and the list is growing.

Having the ability to digitally deliver files that can be converted into a print format at the point of sale addresses the “instant demand” from customers and dramatically reduces the warehousing, shipping, returns, and pulping of unsold books. It can mean huge cost savings for publishers and bookstores, as well as a significant reduction of the industry’s carbon footprint.

Bookstores now have the ability to stock a small selection of popular and bestselling books while also offering titles from an ever-growing catalogue of millions of public domain and publisher-produced books. It’s a new model dependent on digital rather than physical delivery.

For the first time since online bookselling started to boom, an independently owned local bookstore can now compete with the Amazons of the world. You see that title listed online that ships in 24 hours? Your local POD-enabled bookstore can print it right in front of you within the next 15 minutes.

This is not to say that consumers won’t desire digital-born or digital only books. But POD allows for a convenient and low-cost bridge between yesterday and tomorrow, allowing bookstores and publishers to maintain relevance in a digital world.

The future of publishing is already here and it might very well be in a bookstore near you.