The Impact of Print-On-Demand on Academic Books

Suzanne Wilson-Higgins

• Publisher: Chandos Publishing
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780081020111
• eBook ISBN: 9780081020197
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Business Intelligence
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The convergence of online book selling, digital printing, digital document workflow management and the computerization of small parcel logistics created a unique opportunity to create a viable commercial model for printing and supplying books on demand. This innovation was swiftly embraced by the academic publishing community heralding the rescue of the languishing academic monograph. The possibilities captured the imagination of creative academic and niche publishers enabling custom publishing, student editions of monographs, self-compiled wiki books and even the establishment of new university presses and open access publishers. The Impact of Print on-Demand on Academic Books takes an in-depth look at this phenomenon by looking back on two decades of innovation, reviewing the present state of academic publishing with respect to works being printed on demand and compiling the current forecasts and speculation about the future of academic and niche publishing given the impact of print on-demand. - Presents knowledge on the print-on-demand industry and chronicles developments and their impact on publishing - Provides a useful guide for practitioners and students of publishing, and is ideal for academic publishing historians and business academics interested in innovation and digital developments - Includes an international perspective, with information from Europe, North America, Australia, and Singapore/China - Chronicles business case studies collected from interviews with key individuals from companies who have shaped, or are shaping, the academic POD landscape

Part One

Convergence and two decades of print-on-demand innovation 1995–2015

Introduction to part 1

What is print-on-demand? According to the Oxford English Dictionary the first citation of this noun was in the Financial Times in 31 January 1983, the spelling should be ‘print-on-demand’ and the definition is

“A system or process by which small numbers or individual copies of a text may be printed to order, esp. (in later use) using computer technology; abbreviated POD.”

Of course this definition includes books but might also refer to other types of literature produced through digital printing-on-demand. Here we are concentrating on books printed-on-demand. By August of 2000 the Wall Street Journal was reporting that:

“Most of the large publishers have arranged to digitalise their [book] catalogues and offer such computer-based services as e-books and print-on-demand.”

It may or may not have been true at the time that ‘most large publishers’ were actively digitising their books, but by 2000 print-on-demand for books had arrived. Large academic book publishers formed the vanguard of book publishers to embrace this new approach to delivering books to readers.

While we are clarifying definitions, we need to ask: What is an academic book? The authors of The Future of the Academic Book (2017) most recently asked themselves this question and concluded:

This is as difficult as defining the academic disciplines. The conventional definition is that it is a long-form publication, a monograph, the result of in-depth academic research, often over a period of many years, making an original contribution to a field of study, and typically of 80–100,000 words in length. Articles, in contrast, are shorter (7–10,000 words) and usually less wide ranging. However, the distinctions are becoming increasingly blurred, as digital publishing means that many of the restrictions imposed by print no longer apply. [2]

John B. Thompson in his book Books in the Digital Age (Polity, 2005) makes a distinction between what he calls ‘academic books’—by which he means monographs or specialist texts; and books for ‘higher education’—by which he means textbooks or books for professional development [3]. There is a chapter dedicated to each of these forms in turn in Part 2. For ease of use throughout this book which focuses on a publishing ecosystem of delivery, i.e. print-on-demand for books, I have chosen to refer to both specialist research monographs and education, training and development textbooks used in higher education collectively as ‘academic books’.

The core thesis of this book is that yes, print-on-demand has had a significant impact on academic book publishing and on the academic book over the past 20 years and asserts that print-on-demand will continue to exert some influence over academic book publishing for the next 20 years. How did this come about? How are different forms of academic books impacted? And what does the future hold for print-on-demand academic books? This book brings together some responses to these questions through the voices of key participants in the print-on-demand story: interviews, unpublished case studies (new and old), recent surveys and some published articles. This book offers a macro-level view of a particular consequence of technological innovations coming together in the academic publishing ecosystem. Innovations which have affected a paradigm shift in the book publishing industry in general, but particularly impacted the availability of academic books as well as the way in which they are composed, compiled, assembled, disseminated, and read. This book is an outcome of many micro-level observations from the author and key participants in the revolution: book printers, book publishers, print equipment manufacturers, prepress service providers, online book retailers, book wholesalers, and book distributors. Print-on-demand has enabled change across the academic book supply chain and the markets it serves by supplying robust and profitable revenue streams to publishers embracing it.

Most readers will have some experience of digital transformation either as a digital native or as a digital immigrant in their personal and professional lives. I have spent all of my publishing career knee deep in the digital transformation of the publishing industry, especially the academic and specialist book publishing industry, but also alongside scholarly journals, professional databases and multimedia learning environments. With nearly a decade working with Ingram to establish its UK print-on-demand facility, I felt there ought to be a documented summary of what has happened and the amazing impact that print-on-demand has had on the academic book. Certainly print-on-demand impacted how the academic book is actually made and how it is delivered, and potentially has impacted the very survival of the printed monograph. Not only monographs but also other forms of academic books like custom textbooks, professional training books, grey literature, and book collections have been impacted by print-on-demand. Across all these forms, ensuring availability through print-on-demand increased demand while removing infrastructure costs from the delivery of a specialist book to its reader. At its best, by sustaining revenue streams for academic book publishers, print-on-demand offers the printed academic book the potential to flourish alongside the e-book, e-book collection or online learning environment and giving scholars the choice of a printed interface in a digital world.

Business innovation and creative engagement with technological innovation underpins the print-on-demand revolution. The testimonies that follow illustrate continuous change taking place in book publishing. As a novice business books commissioning editor in 1990, I had the pleasure of preparing to reissue for Butterworth–Heinemann Peter Drucker’s classic management books and in doing so re-read Innovation and Entrepreneurship Principles and Practices [4]. The book was originally published in 1985 when I was studying for a Masters in Business Administration in Scotland and was required reading. It contained significant ideas about innovation in business. Peter Drucker viewed innovation as the instrument by which entrepreneurs exploit change as an opportunity, and Drucker asserts that innovation is capable of being learned not only practiced and that the systematic analysis of the opportunities offered up by change leads to economic or social innovation. Drucker’ populates his book with many corporate examples. As MBA students were taken to IBM’s East Kilbride, Scotland to see the just-in-time manufacturing plant in action as living proof of institutional innovation. Drucker’s ideas concerning institutional innovation were manifest throughout the 2000s in digital publishing and digital printing technology companies like IBM, Xerox, Adobe, Hewlett Packard, and Kodak. These companies had technological innovation as a core competence and acted as the fundamental enablers of digital print book manufacturing and much of the innovation of print-on-demand services for books today was built on their technologies. They embodied institutional innovation as reflected in Drucker’s 1985 writing and became leaders in the creation of the digital composition and digital print which has ultimately revolutionised book publishing by unleashing self-publishing of books, community publishing of books, and sustaining academic books by reaching new markets where a modest rate of demand for a title could be enjoyed over time.

A decade after Peter Drucker’s book, the January–February 1995 issue of Harvard Business Review contained a significant article [5] encapsulating new thinking about business innovation from Clayton M. Christensen (then the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School) and Joseph L. Bower (then the Donald Kirk David Professor Emeritus at Harvard Business School). The idea was essentially a thesis born of observation in many businesses that disruptive technologies often surprise leading companies who are so absorbed in listening to their mainstream customers that they miss the next generation of innovation for what seem small but are emerging markets. To address this problem the writers recommend businesses create and invest in organisations that are independent of their mainstream business.

Kodak notably became a victim of this type of surprise by ignoring the disruptive technology of digital photography. Ironically, Stephen Sasson at Kodak invented the first digital camera in 1975 but even as late as 1993 Kodak’s management could not see beyond their market leadership position delivering what their current customers wanted in film-based colour printed photography. As early as 1990 Danka International Services Inc., part of Kodak Digital Printing, clearly a cradle of institutional innovation, collaborated with IBM to solve the problem of just-in-time computer manual manufacturing. Less than a decade later that software solution and its development team became the bedrock of Lightning Source Inc.’s print-on-demand for books success. Once it was married up to a powerful online bookselling catalogue this in turn became a disruptive technology in the book industry by enabling the self-publishing revolution. Many academic book publishers engaged with this service and Ingram’s Lightning Source features in several cases and interviews that follow.

From 1995 to 2005 these ideas about institutional versus disruptive innovation provide a context for the emergence of digital printing, digital media, online retailing and digitally enabled logistics. The Xerox Corporation pioneered the way for managing documents and printing them on-demand, eventually in bound book form, when they released the DocuTech Production Publisher Model 135 in 1990, subsequently attaching these machines to computer networks and by 1993, like Danka, had a complete document service model for companies. Xerox became ‘The Document Company’ with a digital X in its logo symbolising the transition of documents between the paper and digital worlds. Meanwhile in August 1991 the first website went online from Tim Berners-Lee starting the worldwide web on the Internet which subsequently saw exponential growth thereby captivating Jeff Bezos’ attention and he started Amazon in the summer of 1994 in his garage. The book selling website went live in the summer of 1995. Innovations born in Drucker’s institutional innovation era and innovations born of disruption, as reflected in Christensen/Bower’s ideas, were now set on trajectories to converge in the publishing world by 2000. The academic book was caught up in the centre of these changes.

In 2006 Professor Ron Adner, The David T. McLaughlin Chaired Professor and Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College conducted business innovation research and wrote in Harvard Business Review that innovation takes place in ‘ecosystems’ and that these:

… are characterized by three fundamental types of risk: initiative risks—the familiar uncertainties of managing a project; interdependence risks—the uncertainties of coordinating with complementary innovators; and integration risks—the uncertainties presented by the adoption process across the value chain. [6]

Print-on-demand for books illustrates an innovation ecosystem and all three of these risk types can be observed in the interviews and case studies that follow concerning print-on-demand for academic books. The academic book publishers were early adopters of the publishing and supply chain solution that the newly integrated technology offered. Hearing from both innovators of services to publishers and the publishers who used those services to innovate is a core purpose of this book. Those innovations have in turn benefitted scholarly communication and the academy.

Part 1 of this book dedicates a chapter to each of the four critical innovations that had to be present in the publishing ecosystem to enable print-on-demand to impact academic book publishing and consequently the academic book. These are: digital prepress for on-demand which comprises digital composition, digital workflow and digital asset management; digital print and book manufacturing on-demand; bookselling on-demand; and book fulfilment on-demand which is the 21st century book supply chain complete with order management, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), barcodes and pick, pack, fulfil automation. The interviews and/or case studies in each chapter help to ground the reader in the practical working out of this convergence and implementation of print-on-demand for academic books in university presses, profit-making book publishers and the data services suppliers.

References*

[2] Deegan M. The Academi...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Why read this book?
• Part One: Convergence and two decades of print-on-demand innovation 1995–2015
• Part Two: Normalised, commoditised, and adopted, print-on-demand for books today (2015–17)
• Part Three: Forecasts and trends for print-on-demand in academic book publishing
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Bibliography
• References
• Index