By a considerable margin, digital printing is the biggest change to book publishing I’ve seen since starting in the field at the tail end of the Clinton Administration. I’m using the term loosely to include a cluster of technologies—maybe you’ve heard some of the acronyms, like POD (print on demand) and SRDP (short-run digital printing).
Since I’ve never worked directly on the production side of things, my specific knowledge of digital printing is pretty shallow. But I know it’s not generally a Jetsons-style arrangement where a person on the street walks up to a big metallic gizmo, inserts a coin, and sees it spit out a fresh-from-the-oven bound book. That’s the consumer-facing Espresso Book Machine, which enjoyed a blip of Space Age Bachelor Pad enthusiasm earlier this century. (You can still find one, or at least you could when I last visited a few years ago, at McNally Jackson Bookstore in New York.)
For most people involved with books, digital printing happens behind the scenes at offsite printing facilities, or sometimes at Amazon, which has its own digital program. It’s just another printing technology, and as a reader you wouldn’t generally know if a book had been printed conventionally (that’s called offset printing) or digitally. Digital printing is usually limited to paperbacks, and if you want a tip that you’re reading a book printed digitally, there’s sometimes a code on the last page, like this.
Why has digital printing been so revolutionary? Basically a publisher can print as few units as it needs to, which means it’s easier to take a chance on titles where the size of the market is harder to gauge—or where the market is predicted to be small but there’s still a compelling reason to publish the book.
I’ve seen digital printing’s successful arc in my own time as a publisher. When I started in 1998, I was told that an initial print run needed to be at least 2,000 units, which now seems very high. (Keep in mind that one much-cited report saying that these days only one book out of a hundred manages to reach sales of 5,000 copies.) Things started to change in the mid-aughts. Digital printing became viable, print runs often came down, and publishers ran less risk of getting left with hundreds of unsold units out of a run. At the smaller, independent university presses where I spent most of my career, it was a lifesaver. Being able to print small runs responsibly meant we could stick with the mission-oriented publishing at our core. Digital printing in small batches also made it easier to keep a book in print, printing just a few units at a time, as necessary, deep into a title’s life.
And book publishing does tend to remain a print game, despite all the predictions of a paperless future. Ebooks are important—these days I read a lot of them—but at the houses I know best, they account for no more than 10 to 20 percent of sales. The bottom line is that the digital revolution arrived, but it arrived with digital printing more than with reading books digitally.
The least-consequential phenomenon of the twenty-first century? I’ll go with enhanced ebooks, where the idea was you’d want movies or songs or whatever embedded in the middle of your digital book. These were a fad for a while, circa 2012, around the same time book publishers were convinced they needed to get into apps. Other than publishing professionals who gave presentations about enhanced ebooks (and there were a lot of them), I’m not sure I know anyone who’s ever read one.
History is littered with futuristic experiments that didn’t pan out, and I don’t mean to pick on proponents of enhanced ebooks. These experiments can cost a lot, though, and to the extent they divert resources from traditional publishing—all while signaling, implicitly or explicitly, that traditional publishing is old-fashioned and no longer deserves support—they can be genuinely destructive.
For me, the success of digital printing imparts an important lesson: Technological change in publishing is often most effective when, instead of giving rise to some big disruption, it enables continuity for books and the people who read them.
I’m interested in responses from readers, authors, and publishers on the century’s big and small changes. And if you know more about printing than I do, feel free to correct anything I got wrong . . .