Post- Digital Print - Monoskop

3.5 print on demand, the balance of power
between paper and pixel.
Print has specific qualities which remain as of yet undisputed. Holding
a printed object in one’s own hands, or seeing it on a bookshelf, remains
an essential experience in (at least some parts of ) our cultural
environment. And the ‘balance of power’ between print and digital
(if we still assume the end result to be some kind of printed product)
seems now to lie with one technology which, more than any other, is
allowing the printed page to survive the ‘digitisation of everything’:
print on demand.
During the late 1990s, most of the ‘prepress’ services (small businesses
which helped customers convert their often messy digital files
into plates suitable for offset printing) started mutating into today’s
digital printing services. Increasingly, digital printing machines were
replacing offset printing for short print runs; this was made possible
by the rapidly falling prices of high-speed laser printers (the first
commercially available laser printer, introduced in 1977, was the
Xerox 9700; 117 such machines were originally marketed to large office
departments, enabling them to quickly print high-quality structured
documents). Within just a few years, dedicated digital book-printing
facilities were set up across the world, and the technology is now being
seriously considered by publishers, particularly since the onset of the
current economic crisis.
Print on demand (POD) is an extremely simple concept: the customer
produces a PDF file of a magazine or book, and the POD service
charges the customer a fee (there are cheaper and more expensive
services, depending on the quantity and quality of services provided)
to prepare and adjust the files for the production chain of a high-resolution,
large-format, continuous digital copier. The customer can order
any number of copies (even a single one) and the product is typically
delivered within a week or so.
In addition to the actual printing, the POD firm may offer some important
additional services:
1. The firm can arrange to sell the publications online through its
own infrastructure, paying the author or publisher monthly
percentages on sales.
2. POD firms, especially the major ones, can provide detailed
information about their publications to online outlets worldwide,
in order to generate orders. This is what Simon
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