Offset printing is a higher-quality traditional printing method which prints hundreds or thousands of copies in a single ‘print run’.Print-on-demand is an automated digital printing method which makes one book at a time, on demand.There are key differences between POD and offset printing to take into account. ![]() What’s the difference between POD and offset printing?īut perhaps we’re running ahead of ourselves. And because we are based in China and can print anything from as few as a couple of hundred up to thousands of books in a single run, we can offer extremely competitive pricing all over the world. The services we offer use skilled designers, printing experts, the highest quality sustainable materials, and the very latest printing technology. And we know because we publish a lot of books every year for self-publishing clients. Most books are printed by custom offset printers like ourselves. The POD share of the market is still very small. Whereas an offset printed traditionally published book is more likely to sell an average of 10,000 copies. The vast majority of POD books sell fewer than 200 copies in their lifetime. The reason why mainstream publishing houses and savvy, successful self-publishers eschew print-on-demand and invest in custom offset book printing is simple: it’s cheaper and you get a superior product.Īccording to an article by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, print-on-demand book sales are dismally low. But as soon as you’ve started generating regular sales and grown your list, it may be time to up your game. POD is a handy starter mode if you’ve never published anything before, you’re new to the industry, you don’t have much capital to invest, and you don’t yet have a fan base or a significant email list. If POD was the self-publisher’s panacea that’s it’s often cracked up to be, then mainstream publishing houses would be using it, too, and the offset printing business would have given up the ghost a long time ago. While there’s a lot of noise about the ease and cost-efficiency of POD services - largely created by the marketing departments of those services! - contemporary self-publishers are waking up to the better options available to them. As successful self-publishers have more capital to invest in their businesses, they’re moving away from the POD services and looking to traditional printers to produce superior products while enjoying significant savings and a higher return on their investment. But what’s more interesting from our point of view - as a major international custom printing company - is that the lines between self-publishing and traditional publishing are beginning to blur. While there are signs that the curve is beginning to level off, there’s no doubt that the rise of the e-reader and POD book services have changed the face of modern publishing forever. The self-publishing revolutionĪccording to a recent Bowker report on self-publishing, close to 2 million books are self-published each year in the US alone. Since then, the self-publishing industry has boomed, evolved, and matured. Create Space - now absorbed into KDP - was a POD (print-on-demand) paperback book printing and distribution service specifically designed to cater to the self-publishing community. In 2016, they added what was then ‘Create Space’. We explore why.Īmazon’s eBook exclusive self-publishing platform, KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) launched in 2007. As the self-publishing industry matures, more self-publishers are leaving print-on-demand and discovering the benefits of traditional custom book printing.
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