Order To Print
Printer that will print individual copies of books.
A printing company that will print any number of copies of a book on demand (not necessarily immediately).
Including out of print books.
They should also give the option of printing and binding copies of scanned antique books and rare, where possible.
Prices could be reduced for batches of printing, if bulk printing the same book means decreases in costs on the company.
+[project]
[Cabria], there are such companies! Pact Publishing for example. What is missing to consider this baked?
" Packt’s mission is to help the world put software to work in new ways, through the delivery of effective learning and information services to IT professionals. " - Totally different mission. They're providing an education tool Does not address the problem at all. I don't know how the two would be confused?
Order to Print is more about out of print books. I'm talking about existing books or books that used to be in print and not limited to any particular sector (Packt target IT sector). Order to Print would also allow an author to avoid the risk of paying a huge amount of money for thousands of copies of their book to be published without knowing if people will actually want to buy it and at the offered price.
So, for example: I run 'Order to Print' Ltd. You, an author, approach me with your new novel and Ruta approaches me with her new cookbook. The book is designed and pretty much ready to print, can easily be sold as an e-book. I have an online catalogue of ebooks that readers can peruse. 200 people purchase the ebook of your novel but 20 people want a hard copy of it. 20 other people want a hard copy of Ruta's cookbook the same month. So I print 20 of each and send them to the requesters at the end of the month.
That way, I don't print shitloads of hard copies that will then end up on disheartening discounts or recycling bins with their barcodes removed. And if the hard copy of Ruta's cookbook is in high demand, I can print more and more of it as people request it and sell them.
It reduces the waste of overprinting and allows more control over the whole process. It also acknowledges the diversity of people's preferences for ebooks/hard copies.
Packt is totally different, does none of this, and is completely irrelevant to this discussion. Sorry.
[Cabria], sorry. I thought about publishing. I remember Google Books had previously offered the option to get books, which are out of print, printed, and delivered. I guess, they were using the Espresso Book Machine (video). Maybe there is an alternative to it, but to start such a company, I'd assume you'd have to lease or buy such a machine.
Espresso books - Perfecto! That's super, [Mindey], thanks for sharing that. Great. It's already done. :-P Tick.
[Mindey] - would be good to be able to archive things like this Idea, once there's a consensus that they've already been implemented. What do you think? Deleting seems a bit harsh...
[Cabria], just let's leave a tag, like [marked-for-deletion] (redundant). Later, we can delete at some time in the future, when we have house cleanup. We should have some kind of house cleanup over time.