Waiting, Godot-like, for anything .epub to mock, I saw this story on PW.
…output of on-demand, short run and unclassified titles soared from 21,936 in 2006 to 134,773 last year, according to preliminary figures released Wednesday by R.R. Bowker.
Sales Rank for “Kessinger” and you’ll note a ridiculous increase, no data beyond author/title, just “we feel it’s too important to leave this book unprinted…. [even the book is out of order, missing pages, whatever].” I counted 126,698 items for Kessinger, with 125,218 “available.”
There’s probably been a surge, certainly the first quarter of ’07 saw spectacular increases in LSI-published titles, but then again, a couple of other people are copying Kessinger’s model and just reissuing works from the Archive and Google Books.
A more interesting POD announcement was the one by Kodak about “Stream Inkjet Technology,” which will bring down per-page costs of print-on-demand books to a level comparable to offset. If they can pull that one off… goodbye offset.
Disclaimer: Four years ago, I licensed 10,000 works on Black Mask to Kessinger. Among other things, I got a condo in Shanghai and a thriving, if retro print business that gets me out of my basement 10-15 times a year out of the deal.
