How Print on Demand Will Save the Publishing Industry

It’s me with another crackbrained prediction about the future of publishing. (We’ll ignore the fact that every crackbrained prediction I’ve ever made has come to pass.) And the one I’m going to make today is going to come to pass, too.

Let me start with a question or two. How many of you check on your amazon.com ranking? And how many of you are aware that unpublished books are also ranked on amazon? That is, as soon as your forthcoming book is listed on amazon, it begins getting ranked. Even though it’s not scheduled for five or six months, an eagerly anticipated book may post a strong ranking. Now, how can that be? How can a book show up in the rankings when it hasn’t even been published? 

The answer is, people are ordering it now! They’re putting their money down today for a book they won’t get for months. They’re subscribing to it. If you look at the amazon listing for any unpublished book, you’ll read the following: “This title will be released on [publication date]. You may order it now and we will ship it to you when it arrives. Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.”

Why should we be excited about this? After all, the stodgy old subscription model has been around for ages, in the form of book clubs: you pay a minimum fee in advance and you get a certain number of books. In fact, you’ll soon be hearing about Zooba.com, an online book club, kind of Book of the Month Club Meets Netflix. So, subscription is in the air. Nevertheless, and by a wide margin, we buy books in brick and mortar stores.

What’s wrong with that model? Well, just about everything. But for anyone who has not read my slavering diatribes over the last twenty-five years, let me summarize why.

Early in the history of publishing in the United States, publishers made a Devil’s bargain with bookshops. The booksellers didn’t want to get stuck with unsold inventory, especially inventory of first novels and other marginal books. So they told publishers, “We’ll take those books on the condition we have the right to return unsold copies for full credit.”

For a long time that system worked fairly well because returns were held to about 10%. But after World War II, for many and complex reasons, the return rate began to rise, occasioning Alfred Knopf’s classic remark, ”Gone today, here tomorrow.” Though publishing seemed to be booming in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, the boom was in good degree illusory. By virtue of printing economics, publishers can make a profit on a bestseller even if thirty or forty percent of the copies are returned. But when the return rate continued to rise to 50%, 60%, or even higher in the 1990s, the chickens came home to roost and publishers started losing money.