One aspect of POD that Curtis mentioned in his recent blog post is the prohibitive cost per book when comparing a typical print
run of a trade paperback with the cost of printing one title at a time per customer request.
Not exact matches
In April, Vintage will publish
trade paperback editions with a print
run of 750,000 copies.
These aren't usually published by independent authors and publishers, as they are sold via supermarkets and corner stores and used by
trade publishers to release long
running, top selling books at reduced prices
of your typical
trade paperback.
Digital sales, direct convention book sales and
trade paperback sales pay some
of that invested money back to me in the long
run, but right now Skullkickers is still not in the «black».
Maybe they don't want it to be too convenient for the monthly subscription fee, lest it cannibalize sales
of digital comics on comiXology or
trade paperback collection, but in our opinion, making comics easier to read benefits everyone in the long
run.
While e-book sales have been leveling off as they absorbed the replacement audience for mass market
paperbacks — because e-book prices are cheap in mass market territory — the sector
of e-books that have been selling the best are the first -
run new bestsellers — the ones with the highest e-book prices initially (although those prices come down over time, just like a
paperback edition and the e-book prices are lower than hardcover and
trade paper usually.)
Dark Horse's anthology series Dark Horse Presents has been through a number
of incarnations at this point: First as a print comic that
ran from 1986 to 2000 and premiered some
of the most outstanding work around; then as a digital comic at MySpace (yes, it's still there) that
ran online for free and was collected into
trade paperbacks.