Print-on-Demand grabbing spotlight from e-books

So far, the impact of e-books has been practically invisible, and it's no mystery. Big publishers haven't discounted them much, giving consumers little incentive to switch from their dead-tree forerunners. When buyers must choose between a fancy hardcover for $18 and an e-book for $12, the e-book loses.

Amazon is moving ahead with e-books while Barnes & Noble seems to be swearing them off. B&N dropped its e-book initiative in 2003, aruging that consumers have rejected the new format.

Meanwhile, while e-books have gotten most of the publicity, free nonfiction on the Web has already made lots of book categories irrelevant. And nobody could have expected a dozen years ago that the hard-copy encyclopedia would be virtually extinct by now.

At the same time, print-on-demand and totally reversed the economics for nich self-publishers. POD enables the efficient printing of books one at a time. In the future, it’s possible that no title would every have to go out of print. And books that didn't have a big enough market to warrant a new edition will stay alive.

No double publishers have electronic files of most books published within the past two decades. Whether POD will bring in enough cash to pay for scanning and reformatting of older titles is anyone's guess at this point.




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