From the issue dated March 30, 2001
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Frustrated Authors: We Can Help You ...By NIKO PFUND and MICHAEL GROSETHSpend enough time on university campuses and your eye will light on a standard feature of many academic offices. There, in the bookcase, often on the top or bottom
If you're reading this article because you are an author and were drawn to the headline, chances are you already know what those volumes are doing there. They are the last remaining copies of a book at the end of its life cycle, a book whose time has come and gone, a book now out of print. That unhappy phrase, "out of print," ranks right up there with "remainder" and "bad review" in the authors' pantheon of unpopular terms. What is more ignominious than having your book -- the object of years of hard labor -- summarily, unequivocally, and often irrevocably killed off? The only honest conclusion you or others can draw is that the book has been selling so few copies because almost no one wants to buy it, that it's so unpopular the publisher would sooner throw away the remaining inventory (after giving you a chance to buy a few extra copies for safekeeping) than just leave it sitting in the warehouse. For publishers like us, declaring books out of print is comparably (although clearly not equally) unappealing, akin to informing someone of a death in the family. In fact, one of the perpetual frustrations of scholarly publishing has been our inability to keep books in stock and in print because of the restrictive economics of printing technology. All too often, a university-press book is published, sells through its printing in several years, and then goes out of stock, often indefinitely, despite the fact that some demand for it still exists. Every book, even a former bestseller, experiences a slowdown in sales over time. Yet, too often, diminished sales have translated into no sales, as the traditional economies of scale combine with the slow pace of demand to make it prohibitive to reprint a book in modest quantities. To most publishers, and certainly to university presses that take as their primary mandate the dissemination of scholarly information -- the publication, in that memorable imperative, of as many books as possible short of bankruptcy -- this phenomenon has been particularly bedeviling. Enter "print on demand." Making use of the latest printing technology, numerous university presses -- Cambridge, Johns Hopkins, N.Y.U., Oxford, and Princeton, to name but a few -- are currently engaged in major initiatives to breathe new life into hundreds of books that have gone out of print or are in danger of going out of stock. Already, thousands of titles are now reaching readers whose interest would previously have gone unfulfilled. It is not hyperbolic to say that this technology stands to transform our industry and represents perhaps the best example of a rare win-win situation in our professional lives. As with any new technology, many players in the book industry have approached print on demand with no small suspicion -- perhaps no one more than authors. But part of what has made our involvement in a print-on-demand initiative enjoyable is finding that we can acknowledge past shortcomings ("Yes, you're right, your book should have been available") while providing answers ("We don't have to allow that to happen again"); as a result, knee-jerk anxieties usually disappear. Perhaps the most important point to make about print-on-demand books is that they are not e-books. In fact, they have nothing to do with e-books, those works like Stephen King's recent novel The Plant that are published solely online. At a time when all manner of issues swirling around electronic publishing -- from the format in which book files are to be electronically saved to how e-books are to be distributed and sold -- are conflated under the umbrella of the term "digital-rights management," print-on-demand books and e-books are arguably related by marriage: Both are rooted in the idea that books should be produced in such a way that their content can be provided to whomever wants it, in whatever form they prefer, for now and eternity. But there are key differences. Print-on-demand books won't be put up on a Web site, they won't be downloadable, they can't be pirated. Print-on-demand books are quite simply books that have been manufactured in response to specific demand, rather than printed by the thousands. By drawing on the final typesetting document for a book (the electronic version of "page proofs"), or by simply photocopying a copy of a traditionally printed book and creating an electronic file to contain it, 1 copy, or 10 copies, or 100 copies can be printed upon request. Think of a print-on-demand book as the same wine via a new bottling mechanism or, more specifically, a photocopy machine so advanced as to be essentially a cloning device. All the fundamentals of the author-publisher relationship are unaffected. The status of copyright, whether owned by the author or the publisher, remains unchanged. Royalties -- the same royalties -- continue to be paid as for books sold (or, rather, printed) by traditional means. Importantly, from a contractual standpoint, no third party enters the author-publisher relationship, which remains intact. The advantages of print on demand are significant. Given the generally small print runs of university-press books -- in some cases, now as low as 600 hardcovers or 200 hardcovers and 800 paperbacks, if they are published simultaneously -- the unexpected adoption of a book by even a single large course can catch a press by surprise, resulting in the book being out of stock and unavailable for an extended period of time while the publisher reprints it. With print on demand, not only does a book not go out of print, but it will never be out of stock (precisely because there is no stock to run out of); it is always available. Indeed, the semantics of the distinction between print on demand and out of print are not likely long for our new technological world. Or consider one of the most common complaints of scholars: "This is a great book, and I'd love to use it for my courses, but the hardback's too expensive, and the publisher won't bring out a paperback." Beholden to traditional offset printing, a publisher must feel confident that a book can reach a minimum audience of 800 to 1,500 readers over two to three years' time to make a paperback edition of a previously published hardcover economically viable. And many scholarly paperbacks simply don't perform at that level. Most every university press has had the experience of being subjected to a letter-writing campaign by an author's colleagues, beseeching the press to issue a paperback edition for the students who are clamoring to be educated therewith; of giving in and proceeding, against one's better publishing instincts, only to see the paperback sell 450 copies in five years and garner nary a single course adoption. But in this age of overnight delivery and instant communication, it seems indefensible and anachronistic for a publisher sitting on a mother lode of high-quality scholarly information to take the position, "Sorry, we know there are some people out there who want your book, but just not enough to make it worth our while to make it available to them." Print on demand essentially makes bringing out a paperback edition less expensive and less risky: no artificially high print runs to create an unattainable profit margin, no bloated freight charges, no warehouse costs, no excess inventory, no inventory markdown, no remaindering. Just sales. At Oxford, we currently have more than 300 backlist titles in our print-on-demand program, most of them paperbacks. Some of these titles have lain fallow for months, even years, and are now enjoying a new life. Some titles may have only one or two steadfast advocates: for example, a professor who had used the volume in the same seminar, year in and year out, and who was then dismayed to discover it was out of stock. Some books, of course, are not "revivable." A work on, say, the human genome, published in 1984, is unlikely to have a readership today. But if even one professor has a reason to structure a seminar around a book, surely we should move heaven and earth to make it available. Our program is still in its early stages, and it's hard to predict the future. But, so far, demand and sales have more than tripled in the last year. While the initial response of our authors to digitally printed books has been highly favorable, some technical constraints do remain. Color images, or "plates," on the inside of a book are not reproducible (but soon will be). The clarity of some black-and-white photographic images is not yet quite up to the standard of offset printing. Oversize books generally don't qualify, given the limitations of current print-on-demand machinery. We are still working through the best bindings and covers for hardbacks that had no jackets in their original printing (as is often the case with science monographs). But those issues will resolve themselves within the next two or three years; in all but a few cases, they are a minor distraction compared with the value of having a book available. Phrased another way, digitally printed books generated by the print-on-demand vendors most commonly used by university presses look as bad today as they ever will. From here on in, they will only look better. And, right now, most of them look much better than you might imagine. It's safe to say, based on our experience at Oxford, that there are already tens of thousands of readers out there unaware that they have purchased a book from a university or commercial press that was printed on demand, because the book looks like any other. Some literary agents and authors' groups have raised the concern that, once a book is available on an on-demand basis, publishers will simply stop promoting it, because they won't be under pressure to move inventory. For the vast majority of older university-press titles -- at present, the best candidates for print on demand -- that is simply a red herring. As most experienced authors know, university presses already necessarily limit their promotion of slow-selling backlist titles (often limiting their efforts to displaying the books at scholarly meetings or listing them in disciplinary catalogs). The books that will most benefit from being printed on demand are those older ones that experience modest, but steady, demand; that is, those most threatened with extinction by the steep costs of offset print technology that make it prohibitive to reprint 500, even 200, copies of a book that sells 11 copies a year. Further, publishers want to sell books, too, whether they are printed on demand or sitting in our warehouse. That's why we at Oxford are taking the extra step of regularly listing books in our seasonal catalog that become available on demand -- even though many of them have never been out of stock and would not be so listed were we reprinting them via traditional means. And, like many other university presses, we are now regularly working with online booksellers to ensure that they update their databases regarding the availability of print-on-demand titles. To be sure, there are still bumps in the road ahead that will need to be smoothed out -- some we've already listed, others we don't even know yet -- and print on demand is no panacea. Making progress will require authors, editors, marketers, booksellers, sales representatives, and printers to educate themselves about the promises and ramifications of this approach to printing and publishing. For publishers, adapting to print-on-demand books will, in the short term, be more onerous than for most other players in the book industry, since it will require a wholesale overhaul of many basic publishing procedures, formulas, and assumptions. (If you know anything about cost accounting, you know of what we speak.) But in a publishing world awash in rhetoric and hype that swings from breathless to fatalistic predictions -- whether about the death of the book, the birth of the e-book, or, now, the prolonged labor pains of the e-book -- print on demand is a tangible and positive development that, even as it improves at a rapid clip, is already paying dividends -- in every sense of the word -- to authors, publishers, and readers alike. So, clear some room on that bookshelf. And, while we can't speak for other university presses, if you're an Oxford author whose book is out of print, please drop us a line. Niko Pfund is academic publisher and Michael Groseth is marketing director for humanities and social sciences at Oxford University Press. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B7
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Copyright © 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education