http://paidcontent.org/2013/05/17/when-can-a-book-be-digital-only-and-when-does-it-need-to-be-print-too/ Book publishers are increasingly experimenting with
digital-first and digital-only initiatives, where they publish a book only as
an ebook and then publish a print edition later, or never. It’s a good way to
take a chance on unknown authors, but it also means that a book is not
available in all the formats that a customer might want it. At the Book
Industry Study Group’s Making Information Pay conference on Wednesday,
publishers discussed print versus digital — “p. versus e.” — strategy.Rachel Chou, the chief marketing officer at Open Road Media,
noted that the company only publishes between twelve and fifteen front-list
(new) titles per year; everything else is back-list. Most of the titles are
available only as ebooks, but Open Road makes some available through
print-on-demand (POD), and will do short print runs if a book is really taking
off. “There are certain books that really need to be in a [physical]
bookstore,” she told moderator Phil Olila, chief content officer at Ingram
Content Group. “They deserve that table up front, they have that reader that
really wants to hand out a gift.” Open Road starts print runs at 500 copies,
and the largest print run they have done is 15,000 copies. “If we’ve done a
print run and we find that it’s really taking awhile to get through the
inventory,” she said, “we can switch it back” to POD.
