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I have been fortunate in my life to be part of many industry-changing events. Not responsible for them, mind you, but in the right place and the right time, and lucky enough to recognize, at least on some level, what was happening and how it would ultimately and irrevocably change things.

Although I am dating myself, I will admit that I installed one of the earliest 3Com networks in Silicon Valley in the early 1980s, sold early print-on-demand systems based on workstations and networked printers ranging from 30 to 120 pages per minute (but only 300 dpi!), and peddled desktop publishing systems at about the time the first Macintoshes were seeing the light of day.

But one of the most exciting breakthrough events I have been involved in during my long and checkered past was the launch of the Xerox DocuTech in 1990, which truly brought print-on-demand to life, offering for the first time a level of quality that could begin to compete with black-and-white offset, and enough speed that it could be used for things like on-demand production of books.

In 1994, when Xerox was launching the second generation of digital front end for the connected DocuTech, known as DocuSP, the company staged an event at the Javits Convention Center in New York City in conjunction with the AIIM show. It was industry-focused and comprised of a number of demonstration pods showing key applications for each of those industries that could be produced more effectively with a print-on-demand model. My role was to repeatedly deliver a 14-minute spiel on books on demand.

Back then, Jerry Rachfal and Pete Perine were the minds behind the concept. It was Jerry's role to convince publishers that they should move some of their business to a print-on-demand model, while Pete Perine was responsible for developing the business model. Jerry had the tougher job—nearly 15 years later, publishers are finally starting to aggressively incorporate print on demand into their business models and the concept is gaining critical mass!

Book Publishing: A Wasteful Model

Some 40 percent of trade books distributed by publishers to bookstores are remaindered, or returned to the publisher for destruction or for sale on the discount book table. With conventional publishing methods, when a book is out of print, or "backlisted," it historically has not been accessible to readers until enough copies are requested to justify reprinting—usually around the 1,000 to 1,500 mark. Many books written are simply never published—in fact, industry pundits estimate that some 500,000 books are written each year and only 50,000 of them get published.

At a time when the world is increasingly focused on improved operating efficiencies and environmentally friendly business operations, this is an extremely wasteful model. Not only do we waste the energy and resources associated with large numbers of printed books that end up in the landfill, but we are wasting the intellectual property associated with the difficulty authors face in getting published in the first place, and for older books to be reprinted and available for consumption.

The Life of a Book

Back in 1994 when Perine was hard at work developing a new business model for consideration by publishers, he laid out metrics for the role digital printing could pay in improving the efficiency of the book life cycle—bringing costs down and making content available more affordably over a longer period of time.