[Buddha-l] Publishing books (was Rain)

[Christopher Fynn]

On demand publishing is quite inexpensive. This is where the publisher stores a
PDF with an on-demand-printing service. When a book is ordered the order gers
re-directed or copied to the on-demand-printer who prints and binds however many
copies have been ordered overnight and ships the copies direct to the customer
or vendor the next morning. This is a more or less fully automated process.
Although the cost of printing an individual copy may be slightly higher, this
way there is no money tied up in printing 500 or a 1,000 copies and then waiting
perhaps years for the majority of the books to sell with all the overhead that
entails. You also avoid all the set up cost involved in offset printing (plate 
making along with the substantial waste of paper, and amount of time involved in 
getting the press set up properly for each job).

There may be limitations with some services - Typically you are limited to 
specific page sizes, you may not be able to include colour plates and the cover 
design may need be fairly simple. The publisher also has sometimes have to pay a 
one time fee to the on demand printer for the set up for each book. All these 
things are changing some odp services now offer full colour, hard binding, and 
no set up charges.

You will notice quite a number of "respectable" publishers are now using this 
type of service to make available books that were for years out of print. OUP 
for one are doing this with their back list <http://www.oup.co.uk/booksellers/pod/>.
Some of more recent of the pricey publications from Brill and so on look to me 
like they were printed using On Demand Printing equiptment - if so they are 
pocketing a lot of cash.

I formatted a couple of books for the Tibet Information Network (TIN) who 
publish all their books this way - these typically retail for under  £15 / $30 
for a 200+ page book - and they make a profit. I can see no good reason for 
academic books of a similar size to cost more.

If you're interested in this - check around carefully - there are now literally 
hundreds of on demand printers and publishers.

So if you know how to use page layout software and create PDF files suitable for 
professional printing it is easy enough to become a publisher  at very little 
cost and no risk using one of these services. As long as you can get ISBN 
numbers for your publications and get listed on Amazon you're away. The ODP 
takes care of printing and shipping all the orders.

- Chris

P.S. DVDs are not a very good idea - the life span of DVDs is *much* less than
that of CDs - which we now know can have a lifespan of 25 years or so if little 
used and well taken care of. This is for the kind of CD burnt and lacquered at a 
factory- *not* the CDR's you burn in your computer which are still much better 
than any DVD. I've noticed DVDs often start to fail even after only a year or 
two of just sitting on the shelf. For important elecrtonic data I use only CDs 
and DAT tape. Even these should be periodically re-copied to fresh media.



Margaret Gouin wrote:
> On Mon, August 27, 2007 6:27 pm, Richard Hayes wrote:
>> After my experiences publishing through Kluwer (and having to buy books
>> that colleagues have published through Curzon, Routledge, Brill and so
> on, I
>> heartily agree. The chair of my department has been urging us to consider
>> publishing as much as possible on the Internet or at least through
>> affordable publishers rather than going for pricey prestige.

> There is a website called LULU (www.lulu.com) which allows authors to
> self-publish online; readers have the option to purchase a printed and
> bound copy (at a price). This might be useful as a starting model or
> source of ideas for academic publishing.

> The issue came up at the last seminar of the International Association for
> Tibetan Studies (2006). The IATS commits to publishing every paper
> presented at its seminars; the proceedings now run to somewhere in the
> region of 18-20 volumes, each one very expensive. The problem obviously is
> that there are very, very few libraries that will pay to get a complete
> set every three years or so. As of the last (2006) seminar, the folks at
> IATS still hadn't got their heads around the idea of publishing in
> electronic format on a DVD, although I think (hope) there's some movement
> in that direction. We'll see at the next seminar (2009 or 2010).

> Another advantage of DVD publication is the possibility of including
> high-quality images, not to mention video and sound.


> All in all, the best way to go--surely?
> 
>