POD Technology

The irreplacable Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers' Newtork has been good enough to pen something for me on POD technology. Dan Wickett? you ask. Isn't he that guy who does all the interviews and reviews of new writers? Well, yes, but he also has seen the fruits of POD technology firsthand via Author's Guild's Back In Print program. In addition, he's spoken with authors who have used POD technology to bring their books back from out of print status. So he knows his shit is what I'm saying.
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Back in Print
by Dan Wickett

Amazon’s buying of BookSurge has people talking about Print on Demand (POD) and the potential elimination of one of the book collector’s favorite topics – Modern Firsts. If publishers went the POD route, with no set print runs, all one would need to do to get a copy of one of those rare books would be to order one up. No such thing as a first or second edition unless typos were caught and fixed.

One possible positive of course, is the idea that those out of print (OOP) rarities that everyday readers would like to find copies of, but can’t afford – say a copy of Lee K. Abbott’s first story collection, The Heart Never Fits Its Wanting, could suddenly become readily available. A non-collector probably isn’t going to drop the $75 to $157.50 that the 8 available copies via www.abebooks.com are priced at. (As an aside, the good news is some of these stories should be more readily available when Abbott’s New and Selected Stories is released by Norton next year!). If OOP books such as this one were suddenly available again via POD technology, many authors who begin with very small print runs, and then get popular later in the game, would see those earlier works available to their fans at non-collector prices.

This, in fact, is already being done to a small extent through the Author’s Guild. They have instituted a back in print program (www.backinprint.com). As long as the author is a member of the Guild, has two copies of the original book to send in that will not be returned, has written permission from the original publisher who let the book go out of print, and any other necessary permissions that were acquired the first time around (song lyrics, quotes, poems, etc.), they can see their books back in print, one copy at a time. This is done for backinprint.com by iUniverse – who, per their website, is “one of the largest print-on-demand book publishers in the United States.”

One such author is Richard Grayson. Grayson’s stories remind me a bit of those of Stephen Dixon. His narrators frequently trace their actions from the moment they are about to wake up through just after falling asleep, without skipping much of what they do. As well regarded as Dixon often is, he’s hardly a big print run author, and Grayson is even lesser known. Not surprisingly, his early short story collections have gone OOP. I asked him how he felt the project was working.

Grayson said, “I've been happy with the three books they did as part of the Backinprint.com series, and ‘I Brake for Delmore Schwartz’ is in production now and will come out later this year. As an Authors Guild member, this cost me nothing upfront. The only charges were for the copies I myself ordered, and I get an author's discount. So it seemed like a no-brainer: the three books were only in hardcover and long out of print except for ‘Caracas Traffic’.”

Having used www.abebooks.com frequently in the past to find books long unavailable, I decided to see how difficult it would be to find some of Grayson’s works. His collection ‘With Hitler in New York’, published in 1979 by Taplinger Publishing Company has 9 copies to be found, in the original hardcover format with dust jacket. The prices range from $5.50 to $35.00, and three of the books are priced less than the $12.95 you’ll find from the iUniverse backinprint.com website. The results were pretty similar with the other titles Grayson has re-printed through the Author’s Guild: ‘Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog’ and ‘I Survived Caracas Traffic.’

The differences between the original versions and the backinprint versions are minor – aside from the originals being hardcover and the POD books are paperback. The cover photo is different too. Besides that, the books announce themselves as Author Guild Reprints with a stripe across the top of the front cover, as well as with backinprint.com and iUniverse boxes on the back cover. There is also a mention on the copyright page and a full page in the back of the book describing the Authors Guild Backinprint program.

The other difference is in the quality aspect of the book. While I do not have any of the original versions of the three books by Richard Grayson that I have copies of the backinprint.com versions of, I am sure the individual pages look better in the originals.

The reason iUniverse needs two copies of the original OOP books is so they can copy them. That is exactly what the pages of the stories reminds me of in the POD versions – photocopies. As one who used to make copies of stories and, in some cases, entire books, back in my college days, I am sadly very familiar with the appearance of such. The type jumps from the pages with that look of ink and not type. While I don’t have copies of any of Grayson’s hardcovers, I do have a paperback copy of his story collection, ‘The Silicon Valley Diet,’ published by Red Hen Press. Page by page, this book has much more of a book appearance than the three backinprint.com books. The type print looks like type and not ink.

Beyond that appearance issue, the binding appears secure, flopping the book down at the page one stops at doesn’t seem to do any damage to the spine, but I must admit, I’m a bit overly careful with my books while I read them. The covers are of the type that once you begin reading the book, or set it down in that tent fashion one or two times, the covers will flare out at the edges, not my favorite to be sure, but the backinprint.com books aren’t the only paperbacks that do this.

So, if copies can still be found, sometimes cheaper than the Authors Guild versions, why would an author go through the regaining permissions, and everything else that goes with the backinprint.com process? For Richard Grayson it was simple. “I could have paid more to get something other than their non-uniform cover and I could have paid to have an author photo, but basically I was just trying to keep the work in print to have a record that the books existed.“

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Comments

[Jason Pettus]

Great guest post, Dan - and Scott, I love that you've been looking into POD so seriously recently. Something to ponder - if you think all these recent developments are intriguing, just wait until the cost of a POD setup gets down to the price of a personal computer (US$1,000 or so, versus the $10-15,000 for a minimum setup right now). The day is coming (sooner than you might think) when individual authors will have full-blown printing presses right in their living rooms - that, I think, is when you're really going to see some profound changes in the publishing world. And on a personal note - as a self-publishing author, I've been contacted by iUniverse a dozen times over the years, concerning printing my books through them. iUniverse, however, REFUSES to let authors have any say over the layout of the book, the cover art, even what typeface is used or what size the margins will be (even when you offer to accept less money per book, which I've done). This wouldn't necessarily be that big of a problem, except that iUniverse does an incredibly shitty job of it themselves, and the books end up looking so amateurish that I can't imagine anyone picking one up at a bookstore and saying, "Yes, I think I'll take a chance on this." Authors be warned...