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Book Publishing, Inplants & Digital Printing - 2
November 14, 2007

In our last episode we started to discuss the difference between traditional publishing and self publishing. Self publishing is associated with print on demand and digital printing. Like most discussions about print on demand and digital printing the question of run lengths came up and we talked about  the traditional definition for on demand printing, which is print runs less then 5000 in length.

Then we started to talk about best sellers. In my experience in the general commercial printing space, the best selling books, like Harry Potter are the exception while the vast majority of books rarely sell 5000 copies.

It has also been well documented that certain book markets are shrinking such as Elementary and High School, Juvenile and paper books while others are growing such as religious books (Book Industry TRENDS 2005). This was clearly important to this audience which was religious book publishers. In addition, a report published by INTERQUEST in October 2005 predicted that letter sized page growth for books and manuals would increase from 74 B in 2007 to 91 B in 2009.

What was interesting is what several people in the audience said about typical run lengths of religious books . They said that the most religious books are printed in run lengths of 10,000 – 15,000. This is higher then in the general commercial world and consistent with the market research discussed above. For those of us who struggle to sell a few thousand books on Digital Printing, this means that a book on Self Publishing Religious Books, would most likely sell better. Next issue we will discuss inplant issues and presses with internal platemaking.

Posted by Howie Fenton on November 14, 2007 | Comments (0)