Digital Book Production: The Demands of On Demand

The growing demand for more narrowly-focused books has led to a quest for affordable "run of one" book printing. The economies of scale in offset production made extremely low press runs impractical—outside the realm of expensive vanity projects. Digital, on the other hand, promises little or no makeready overhead. In theory, digitally printing a book could be as easy as making a photocopy. Of course, a printer's profitability ultimately depends on volume, so there must also be practical ways to combine thousands or millions of very short runs, and produce them at a sufficiently high quality to meet consumer expectations.