Books On Demand

You've heard of "just-in-time" manufacturing for the automobile industry, "seagull management" for the Financial sector, now comes "print-on-demand" for the retail book store Borders.

They said this week that they are planning to install digital printing capabilities in its bookstores next year allowing to store entire books digitally and printing them only when requested. How cool is that? Not only will they hopefully save a few rainforests on the way, on-demand printing bypasses the publishing industry's notoriously inefficient forecasting and distribution system which is estimated that 30 to 40 percent of books are returned to publishers unsold, according to industry data.

"This is expanding the market for our books," said Katherine Goldring, director of marketing at the New York Academy of Sciences, a small technical publisher whose Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences is distributed by Sprout. "Typically our books aren't available in stores, except by special order, which some booksellers are reluctant to process," Goldring said.

All this talk of digital paper leads us rather nicely onto our next story ...

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