PRINT-ON-DEMAND

Click here for a list of available POD titles.

Part of the original plan for HEB was to investigate the varieties of publishing formats that could be derived from single sources for both its retrospective collection and its new XML titles. Deriving both multiple formats and revenue streams is essential for both publishers and scholars in today’s rapidly evolving scholarly communications environment, and the ability to create a production model that takes into account the multiplicity of access possibilities and audiences is an essential task of HEB.

In January 2005 therefore HEB launched its Print-on-Demand (POD) program. Print-on-Demand is a fairly recent technology that uses digital printing techniques to produce standard print books in a rapid and cost-effective process. Generally publishers refer to two types of production models when they discuss “POD”: both true print-on-demand, which is the production of one copy at a time through a variety of manufacturing schemes; and short-run-digital production (SRD), which produces very small quantities of a title, mostly for course adoption and small book-trade orders. Both methods employ similar digital printing processes. The HEB program can produce both true POD and SRD copies: producing individual copies for scholars, students, and individual readers as needed on a one-at-a-time basis, or multiple copies for course adoptions. The quality of POD copies has recently achieved a level that these print versions offer the same quality as traditional offset printing for text. Image quality is less advanced, but perfectly usable for scholarly, teaching, and general reading purposes.

Through its partners at the Scholarly Publishing Office at the University of Michigan, HEB has provided a wide range of print-copy choices, ranging from unbound “reader’s copies” and spiral bound to both soft and hard (case) bound copies, all at affordable prices, far below those of commercial vendors and far below the cost of these titles on the rare or used book market, when available. SPO offers copies either through its own facilities (15 cents per page) in loose-leaf, spiral bound, and tape bound formats; or through Lightning Source, the POD vendor for dozens of university and commercial publishing companies (at 11 cents per page), in cloth-covered hardbound format. Expect about two weeks for delivery.

The HEB program currently includes over 300 selected titles from all fields in its online collection. The program includes both in- and out-of-copyright works but is restricted to titles that are not in print with a publisher (except for reprint or POD houses). Titles included in the program are designated by an ordering button on the title record page. A list of POD titles currently in the HEB program is available at
http://www.humanitiesebook.org/pod-titlelist.html.

HEB02.01
rev. 4/21/08