It means that today pretty much anybody can start a book publishing company, because just-in-time print shops will handle literally all of the expensive overhead that is associated with running a publishing company and just print whatever you hire them to print on demand for you once customers actually place orders, sometimes even on a commission basis so you don’t even have to pay the money unless people are actually buying the books you are publishing.
antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
I guess, but print on demand is also more expensive than printing in bulk, when looking per unit, and of lower quality (paper and binding). I’m not too familiar with the details of book publishing but I wouldn’t expect that people are not using this route simply because they failed to notice its benefits.
andros_rex@lemmy.world 1 day ago
As someone who loves books, I avoid print-on-demand. Most of the time they end up with terrible, jpeg artifact ridden covers, disorganized page breaks, and terrible quality text.
antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 hours ago
Yeah, usually they’re just sourced from public-domain book collections such as Google Books (who scan older books which can end up visually messy), and I’m pretty sure some of those that are offered on Amazon were straight-up based on pirated PDFs.
bloup@lemmy.sdf.org 23 hours ago
Print on demand is more expensive because you’re paying a premium for never having to actually spend your own money. This is why these get rich quick types use it, because again literally anybody can do this with basically no money and all of the “expenses” only happen when people actually buy the stuff. Once that happens, the printer takes its cut directly from the sale and then passes on the rest to you without you having to do literally anything or spending any money out of your own pocket.
As for the quality, there’s literally no reason that a book that is printed on demand has to be low quality or use low quality materials. It quite literally only seems like that because the only people who are doing this right now are rich quick types who don’t actually care about what they’re selling and are just trying to minimize the cut the printer takes because that means more money for them.
And all of this is honestly moot anyway because you wouldn’t do this with the intention of using on-demand printing long-term. You would do it just to get started and then as the business grows, it will eventually be able to take advantage of more economical, but high capital investment opportunities like bulk publishing. I only brought it up because it’s literally never been easier to boot strap a business and the proof is the fact that Amazon is filled with AI generated garbage books. So like I’m just not willing to entertain the idea that an individual who literally has fans and clout should have a more difficult time selling books this way than a literal nobody scam artist pushing garbage.
antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 16 hours ago
Well no, it’s the buyer who is paying. Which they might find off-putting, if the final price is too high, so you get fewer buyers and less profit.
Except that in practice they simply are of lower quality. I’ve seen quite enough of such books. Maybe higher quality materials could be used, but that would raise the price for the end-user even more, and possibly slow down the production.
One has to wonder how much money they actually make, though. I saw some YT videos about the topic, IIRC it’s really difficult. Their mere presence doesn’t prove their profitability but only the belief by many people that they could be profitable.
It’s easy to start a business, sure. But you didn’t explain the rest of the process and don’t seem to actually know a lot about the particulars of book publishing (neither do I, but whatever I do know doesn’t agree with your imagined “solution”).