Business Daily (Nairobi)
Mwenda Wa Micheni
5 June 2008
What do you do when all you need is a hundred copies of your eccentric novel to test the market?
What about an academic publisher catering for the needs of two lecturers and 100 students at the university?
Kithaka wa Mberia, a lecturer at the University of Nairobi, went traditional. For a thousand copies of Natala, a women emancipation play, he spent around Sh100,000. This, he says, was to pay for the least number of copies he had to order for the transaction to make economic sense.
East African Educational Publishers has several niche titles - mostly historical and academic - that they keep at a print order of 500 and 700 copies. That means paying more for printing per unit. Traditionally, publishers had to go all the way: print several copies that would gather dust in the warehouse. This means that the publisher spent several thousands of shillings on insurance and even storage. Then there is the money tied in stock.
Not any more, what with the advent of digital technology. Some call it print on demand, others prefer to call it publish on demand. Whatever you call it, POD is the buzzword in the printing and publishing circles today. It's a trend that is slowly crushing publishing rules as we knew them 10 years ago.
With POD, an author can edit his copy, design and even print few copies at an affordable - but higher cost per unit. The author can even go on and sell the book in the digital form and print it only when a reader orders. According to a market survey by Frank Romano, 33 per cent of printing jobs in the US required a 24-hour turnaround by 2005.
The likes of Amazon Books who are using the print on demand method, a printing technology and business process in which copies of a book (or other document) are not printed until an order has been received, are already making a kill in the book retail business.
Last year, Amazon- Online retailer of books, video games, toys, music, and video recordings - recorded a 150 percent increase. Amazon's annual sales grew by 39 per cent. Most of the titles distributed by Amazon are printed on demand through Book Surge, the On-Demand Publishing wing of Amazon.
With POD, BookSurge allows leading publishers to bring slow moving titles that were out of print back into life, test experimental titles and market niche content with minimised risks.
Before the entry of digital technology into the printing industry, it was very expensive to print few copies of a book or document.
This had to do with the manual work involved, tedious process of plate making, colour separation and even moving the bulky books from the printer to the reader.
In the UK and the US, most small presses have already replaced traditional printing machines with POD equipment or passed the responsibility of printing the titles of POD service providers. Many academic publishers use POD services to maintain a large backlist that does not appeal to mass readership.
In a 2006 report titled Trends in print on demand, Jim Lichtenberg noted that print on demand is a rapidly growing segment of the publishing industry that enables publishers to use digital technology to print short-run copies of books.
This was authored by Lichtenberg, President of Lightspeed, a New York-based consultancy. Apparently, even larger publishers have also turned to this technology in special circumstances, such as reprinting older titles that had been out of print or doing test marketing.
"POD books will soon be served up to readers in vending machines when they insert a plastic card into a slot," says Elizabeth Laden, who publishes the Island Park News in Idaho and is an expert on the POD phenomenon.
Even though she notes that inaccurate, poorly written, and unedited books are being published by POD companies, she still believes in the future of the phenomena. But even while catching on in the publishing world, POD is yet to gain a foothold in Kenya where publishers and printers are still very conservative.
Technology expensive
"POD is the new trend, but only makes sense in the case of slow moving titles and titles that are not for the mass market," says Kiarie Kamau, the publishing manager at East African Educational Publishers.
"We have started doing so, but the technology is rather expensive locally, and therefore we are working with a partner in the UK." Already, Nose for Money, written by Francis Nyamnjoh and published by EAEP, is available through POD as distributed by African Book Collective, an online book retailer.
While the unit price of each physical copy printed is higher than that of offset printing, the average cost is lower for very small print runs, because setup costs are much higher for offset printing.
"It makes a lot of sense for an industry like ours that is still printing very few copies," says Riyaz Kurji of Elite computers.
Already, Elite computers who are the reseller of this technology in east Africa has set up three digital HP Indigo printers - two in Tanzania and one in Kampala - where POD is churning out copies. In Kenya, there are few digital publishers in operation.
"POD also offers a range of solutions to combat counterfeiting," says Riyaz. "These range from the relatively basic bar-coding, numbering and personalization, to more elaborate solutions using UV techniques, Microtext, 2-D barcodes, colour coding, and smart packaging solutions."
Mostly, counterfeiting is fought by a mix of security techniques.
They include adding variable data elements to coded invisible ink identifiers.
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