Brace Yourselves—It’s the Attack
of the PoD People!
By Walt Crawford
American Libraries Columnist
Senior analyst, Research Libraries Group
Column for January 2002
Forget Mr. Mold the Stack Monster.
MARC the Magnificent? Old hat.
Conan the Librarian is still on UHF.
It’s up to you to handle . . .
The Attack of the PoD People!
Does your library’s collection policy favor local authors? If not—if you sneer at your aldermen when their great American novels don’t get good reviews in the New York Times—then you can skip this column. You have problems, but this isn’t one of them.
You do collect local authors more avidly than others? It’s a reasonable collection development policy. After all, fewer than 60,000 Americans see their names on published books each year—roughly one out of every 5,000 people. In a city of 60,000 people, exhaustive local collecting might add 12 books a year and do wonders for good will, your library’s connection to your city, and your deep local collection.
PoD: Changing the rules
PoD is shorthand for Print-on-Demand, the form of e-book that dominates most marketplace projections for e-book success. PoD books aren’t really e-books: they’re printed-and-bound books, usually paperback. The difference is that printing and binding takes place when someone needs a copy rather than in predictive quantities.
PoD sales already account for at least half a million volumes a year. As PoD systems become cheaper and more self-contained, and as established companies improve distribution, publicity, and charging, it’s likely that PoD will grow rapidly.
PoD is a good thing for libraries. PoD can make specialized books more available, midlist and backlist publishing more feasible, and “out of print” a temporary state. By eliminating returns and reducing shipping costs to bulk paper and binding materials, PoD offers efficiencies that sometimes offset the higher costs of laser printing and one-off binding compared to traditional publishing. Once printed, a PoD book is just a book, handled like any other book. If the paper’s not acidic and the binding is designed properly, a PoD book may be archival quality.
So where do PoD People come in?
Everyone has a book—or four?
Americans write some 750,000 book-length manuscripts a year—of which fewer than 60,000 are published. Why wouldn’t an unpublished author pay $99 to $200 to publish through PoD, with $200 covering ISBN assignment, generic cover design, Word-to-PDF translation, and listing on a PoD publisher’s Website? That’s not a lot of money when you’ve poured your heart into writing a book.
You’re no longer looking at a dozen extra books each year to handle local authors. It’s now a gross—a dozen dozen—144 books for that 60,000-person community. That’s a minor but noticeable chunk of your budget (when you add cataloging and accessioning) and three or four shelves a year. Most of that gross of books may be gross indeed. Sturgeon’s Law, “90% of everything is crap,” refers to published material; with the PoD shift, you’re up to 99%.
It could be worse. I’d guess that most people don’t write book-length manuscripts without some hope of publication and that many people appreciate how difficult it is to land a book contract. It’s been said that everyone has a book in them. Figure 1,000 books a year, on average, from your 60,000-person city. Are you ready to handle that?
Let’s go one step further. I’ll suggest that most people don’t have one book in them—they have four. How so?
First there are memoirs: the classic “I could write a book.” Then there’s the Wit and Wisdom of Louise Everywoman, those wonderful insights into the human condition. For everyone with a hobby or keen interest, there’s the book that tells the truth about HO-scale model railroading on the Upper Peninsula.
The fourth? How many parents don’t have the urge to write a children’s book? How many genealogy buffs prepare book-length exegeses of their family histories? How many people are sure they have the great American novel inside them? Add those together, and you have another book per person.
Ready to add 4,000 locally written books each year? If not, what will you say to the PoD People?
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