Digital Printing-on-Demand

So there I was: it just past midnight -- my wife and daughter snoring away, each peacefully trapped in their own private world of dreams. Me on the other hand -- I'm off in cramped studio, frantically drawing the last dozen or so pages of my soon-to-be-finished illustrated mega-epic "The Adventures of Jasmin: Attack of the Cheese Men" in fact, I'm so excited about this sure-to-be work-of-art that I want to share it with the whole world and even parts of Detroit. To that end it has to be printed and published and that's where digital print-on-demand technology comes in.

Digital Print-on-Demand is a fairly recent technology that uses -- you guessed it -- digital printing techniques to produce standard print books in a rapid and cost-effective process. Print on Demand is like the second coming to small independent or "indy press" publishers who were used to having to commit to a press run of anywhere from 500 to 1000 books. And if only a fraction of those books sold then guess what -- you just won yourself a garage-full of books.

But I digress.

Print on demand publishing usually falls into two areas: "true" print-on-demand (POD), which is the production of one copy of the book at a time and short-run-digital production (SRD), which produces very small quantities of a title, mostly for course adoption and small book-trade orders. Both methods employ similar digital printing processes. Most reputable POD publishers program can produce both true POD and SRD copies: producing individual copies for scholars, students, and individual readers as needed on a one-at-a-time basis, or multiple copies for course work and the like.