this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
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It means that today pretty much anybody can start a book publishing company, because just-in-time print shops will handle literally all of the expensive overhead that is associated with running a publishing company and just print whatever you hire them to print on demand for you once customers actually place orders, sometimes even on a commission basis so you don’t even have to pay them money unless people are actually buying the books you are publishing.
I guess, but print on demand is also more expensive than printing in bulk, when looking per unit, and of lower quality (paper and binding). I'm not too familiar with the details of book publishing but I wouldn't expect that people are not using this route simply because they failed to notice its benefits.
As someone who loves books, I avoid print-on-demand. Most of the time they end up with terrible, jpeg artifact ridden covers, disorganized page breaks, and terrible quality text.
Yeah, usually they're just sourced from public-domain book collections such as Google Books (who scan older books which can end up visually messy), and I'm pretty sure some of those that are offered on Amazon were straight-up based on pirated PDFs.