Amazon and POD

Amazon has contracted with HP to use their Indigo presses. It will be interesting to see how they use their size along with their ubiquitous site to promote POD.

There are some interesting notes in the article that give us some hints of what is to come. The article says, "In addition to installing HP Indigo presses, Amazon's facilities will be among the first in the United States to install the new HP Indigo Production Manager digital front-end controller, which combines HP IT and graphic arts technologies for rapid file processing in complex digital publishing scenarios." and "The books-on-demand market is expected to grow from approximately 20 billion book pages in 2006 to approximately 38 billion book pages by 2009.(1) This is due chiefly to the increasing demand for small-volume, rare and self-published books."

If the "average" book is 300 pages we have about 125 million POD books published. In 2003 2,492 million books were published. It looks like POD will start to become a significant part of the publishing business. No wonder Amazon is aggressively moving into the business.

So Amazon will have high quality liquid ink presses that include built in graphic art technologies. They are planning on growth (almost doubling over the next three years) and looking at quality. Last year they purchased BookSurge a POD publisher. I can see many small publishers might want to partner with Amazon to eliminate the need for their own presses or printing runs.

What does this have to do with Fantasy? Not a whole lot except that I expect that we will see even more Fantasy POD titles appearing in the foreseeable future. Perhaps this might even encourage more non-traditional small publishers to come out of the woodwork. They will find titles (Fantasy and otherwise) they deem fit to publish and partner with Amazon to print and market them. In the end, this will give authors even more outlets for their work besides traditional publishing and self-publishing.

POD is changing the face of publishing.