Just press print

Gutenberg was just guessing

ESPRESSO might seem an odd name for a bookmaking machine. But the wardrobe-sized apparatus at Blackwell, a bookstore in central London, and 30 other locations worldwide can print a paperback in about the time it takes to make and drink a shot of caffeine. A black-and-white printer produces the pages; a colour one the cover; they are then glued together by a third device which sits behind Plexiglas for passers-by to admire.

To some this is just “retail theatre”, a clever way to lure people into bookstores. But others view it as the logical step in a development that has picked up speed recently, yet has not received nearly as much attention as electronic readers or touch-screen tablets: the printing of books on demand, rather than on a publisher's hunch.

About 6% of books in America are now printed on toner-based or inkjet machines—a rough proxy for print-on-demand (POD)—as opposed to on offset presses, estimates InterQuest, a market-research firm. Over the next five years, it predicts, this figure will increase to 15%. In 2008, the latest year for which data are available, about 285,000 titles were printed on demand or in short runs—132% more than in 2007 and for the first time more than in the conventional way. Amazon, the world's biggest online bookseller, uses POD machines, although it does not reveal how often.

Better technology is one reason for the rapid growth. These days only experts can tell whether a book has been printed on an offset machine or a digital one. But economics is the main driver. Estimating the demand and thus the print run for a book has been a guessing game since Gutenberg's day. This means that the industry's supply chain is exceedingly wasteful. About 30% of books in America are returned to the publisher. Although it still is pricier to print books digitally, the overall cost of printing on demand is lower, since books are printed only when there is a buyer, and thus do not languish in a warehouse merely to be destroyed later.

If there is a company that represents the growth of POD, it is Lightning Source, a sister firm of Ingram Book Company, the world's largest wholesale book distributor. Founded in 1997, it is now the world's biggest on-demand printer with an output of 20m books in 2009. The average print run per title was less than two. The firm operates huge print shops packed with the latest equipment from companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Océ and Xerox. But its secret sauce is special software that, among other things, keeps track of the millions of orders and makes sure that covers do not end up on the wrong books.

University presses, with their thousands of slow sellers, have been among Lightning Source's first customers. About 10% of Cambridge University Press's sales of academic and professional titles are generated by books printed on demand—compared with 3% five years ago. Before POD, if sales of one of the publisher's books dropped below 50 copies a year, it was taken out of print. Now a publisher can keep titles available forever.

POD has also led to an explosion of self-publishing. Websites such as iUniverse, CreateSpace and Lulu allow authors to bypass sceptical publishers. Lulu, for instance, claims to publish 20,000 books a month. Authors upload their works free of charge and pay only when they sell a book. Espresso machines, meanwhile, can download and print any of the 2m out-of-copyright books scanned by Google and a few thousand from conventional publishers, though many are still wary of making their content available in this new form.

Last year Hewlett-Packard, whose machines are known for advanced colour printing, developed an online service that allowed admirers of Barack Obama to customise a picture book about the president's election campaign by adding their own images. The company also operates a service called MagCloud, which allows customers to have their own glossy magazines printed for an affordable $0.20 a page. Several thousand such publications have been produced since the offering was launched a year ago.

Despite all its advantages, POD is unlikely to take over the world. This is because in contrast to digital printing, whose per-unit costs stay pretty much the same, traditional offset printing exhibits strong economies of scale. As long as you have bestsellers with hundreds of thousands of copies, on-demand printing is not going to displace the conventional sort, says David Davis of InterQuest. Then there is regulation. In some countries, such as China, a licence is needed to publish books; others, such as Germany and France, have price controls for books.

All this makes it difficult to predict POD's impact on publishing's supply chain, which is already in upheaval, mainly because of the internet. Readers should benefit from the greater variety. More authors will get published, for instance, but there will also be more competition. Publishers may save money, but they may also lose their role as gatekeepers. The losers are easier to determine: used-book sellers, logistics firms and, of course, the makers of offset-printing equipment. The world's biggest, Heidelberger Druckmaschinen, is said to be considering moving back into digital printing after having spun-off such a business six years ago.

Some believe POD could spur demand for books. Dane Neller, the boss of On Demand Books, which makes the Espresso, wants to put one wherever people might feel the urge to read, from cruise ships to train stations. But he gets most excited when talking about taking the devices to poor countries. “The potential to democratise knowledge,” he says, “is huge.”