The Idea Logical Company

  • Blog
  • Speeches
  • Consulting
  • Clients
  • Media
  • About
  • Contact

The University of Michigan Press announcement

March 26, 2009 by Mike Shatzkin 2 Comments

Day before yesterday (Tuesday), the University of Michigan Press announced that it was no longer doing press runs of scholarly monographs. Henceforth, says the announcement, 50 of the 60 monographs published annually will be done “only as digital editions.”

What a retro way to position a progressive decision!

Publishing with no offset press run (or with one short offset press run) is a totally sensible way to deliver niche books, which scholarly monographs certainly are. But why make a big deal out of the fact that none are being printed in advance of orders?

The reason Michigan is going to this strategy is that so few of these books get sold. So why say you’re stopping anything? There should be no change in Michigan’s publishing and launch strategy (except possibly to go to a no-returns policy on monographs, or on certain parts of their list including monographs.) Why make an announcement that makes some people believe that the “book” they want might not be available to them anymore? Or that it might be available, but in something called a “print on demand” edition which, although they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, suggests the possibility that it somehow isn’t as good as what they would have gotten before?

The end user doesn’t need to know how many copies were printed and bound along with the one s/he bought. There is no reason to confuse the consumer, or the supply chain, with irrelevant information. Do you tell them what size press you printed on? What size roll of paper?

Smart digitally-based publishing, where most sales are made of an all-digital product and marginal add-on sales are of a printed (on demand) version, is going to be the most common model in a very short time. Nobody suffers. Everybody still gets exactly what they want. An announcement positioning this as some kind of a “cutback”  is totally unnecessary and actually is probably counterproductive.

Filed Under: eBooks, New Models, Print-On-Demand, Publishing, Supply-Chain Tagged With: University of Michigan Press

Mike Shatzkin

Mike Shatzkin is the Founder & CEO of The Idea Logical Company and a widely-acknowledged thought leader about digital change in the book publishing industry. Read more.

Follow Mike on Twitter @MikeShatzkin.

Interview with Mike Shatzkin

Book Cover: The Book Business: What Everyone Needs to Know

The Book Business: What Everyone Needs to Know

Sign Up

Get The Shatzkin Files posts by email.

Search

Recent Posts

  • How book publishing has changed in recent decades and the puzzling question of what comes next
  • Doubts about the Department of Justice’s objection to the PRH acquisition of S&S
  • Every publishing strategy should start with Amazon and Ingram
  • Why books are different and why enterprises will be discovering they should be issuing them
  • “Enterprise self-publishing” is coming: the third great disruption of book publishing since the 1990s
  • “The Family Business” is Ingram: the global infrastructure for the book industry
  • Amazon has done so many smart things that some of the best ones get forgotten
  • Remembering Jim Haynes, the man with more friends than anybody else
  • Thoughts about what Covid and 2020 mean for book publishing
  • Introducing ClimateChangeResources.org, organizing and contextualizing the challenge we all face

Archives

Categories

  • Atomization
  • Authors
  • Autobiographical
  • Baseball
  • Chuckles
  • Climate Change
  • Community
  • Conferences
  • Digital Book World
  • Direct response
  • eBooks
  • Enhanced ebook university
  • General Trade Publishing
  • Global
  • Industry Events
  • libraries
  • Licensing and Rights
  • Marketing
  • New Models
  • Politics
  • Print-On-Demand
  • Publishers Launch Conferences
  • Publishing
  • Publishing History
  • rights
  • Scale
  • Self-Publishing
  • SEO
  • Speeches
  • Subscriptions
  • Supply-Chain
  • Technology
  • Unbundling
  • Uncategorized
  • Vertical

Recent Posts

  • How book publishing has changed in recent decades and the puzzling question of what comes next
  • Doubts about the Department of Justice’s objection to the PRH acquisition of S&S
  • Every publishing strategy should start with Amazon and Ingram
  • Why books are different and why enterprises will be discovering they should be issuing them
  • “Enterprise self-publishing” is coming: the third great disruption of book publishing since the 1990s

Search

Archives

Categories

  • Atomization
  • Authors
  • Autobiographical
  • Baseball
  • Chuckles
  • Climate Change
  • Community
  • Conferences
  • Digital Book World
  • Direct response
  • eBooks
  • Enhanced ebook university
  • General Trade Publishing
  • Global
  • Industry Events
  • libraries
  • Licensing and Rights
  • Marketing
  • New Models
  • Politics
  • Print-On-Demand
  • Publishers Launch Conferences
  • Publishing
  • Publishing History
  • rights
  • Scale
  • Self-Publishing
  • SEO
  • Speeches
  • Subscriptions
  • Supply-Chain
  • Technology
  • Unbundling
  • Uncategorized
  • Vertical

Recent Posts

  • How book publishing has changed in recent decades and the puzzling question of what comes next
  • Doubts about the Department of Justice’s objection to the PRH acquisition of S&S
  • Every publishing strategy should start with Amazon and Ingram

Pages

  • Blog
  • Consulting
  • In the Media
  • Clients
  • About Us

Follow Mike

  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter

Search

Copyright © 2022 · eleven40 Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in