Martha Bayne on Substack: "Print on demand is a technology, pure and simple. Some (many) print on demand books are of excellent quality, indistinguishable from an offset printed book. Almost all scholarly books are printed POD these days, which allows university presses to take risks on books that may onl…"

Print on demand is a technology, pure and simple. Some (many) print on demand books are of excellent quality, indistinguishable from an offset printed book. Almost all scholarly books are printed POD these days, which allows university presses to take risks on books that may only sell 300 copies and keep them in print. Some POD books are shoddily produced, due to printer error, publisher cost-cutting, or some weird combination of the two. But POD itself is value neutral.

Jane Friedman

21d

The gist of this piece: publishers are relying on print-on-demand to fill orders and it looks cheaper even though POD costs more to print & costs more for the reader. (It's happened with my own book, so I certainly see the differences.) A few thoughts before people get indignant and angry.

1. Authors get paid the same no matter how the bo…

lithub.com/have-you-purchased-a-weirdly-low-qua…

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Oct 28