Yesterday's posting about the latest Amazon initiative to offer would-be authors a print-on-demand publishing solution generated some interesting comments. Clive Keeble, in an earlier comment wrote:

'I long for the time when the entire Picador backlist is reproduced at a regular price in POD format instead of all this RPU bore : heck, then I'll even open up an account with MDL. Its up to the established publishers to ensure that they have control of the market place.'

The head of Picador, Andrew Kidd, responded:

'Regarding Picador and POD, I wholeheartedly agree. We are moving forward with digitisation of our backlist, and as costs and technologies improve it should not be long before the bad-old-days of RUC are behind us.'

Great. Print in demand is a good thing. However, Susan Hill thinks the quality isn't good enough and so dismisses it. But there is a bigger problem. Anne-Lise Pasch wrote:

'When books are no longer reprinted, do the rights return back to the Author from the Publisher? If so, wouldn't a sensible step be to retain digital rights to push onto 3rd-party services such as Amazon's POD, and thereby extend the 'shelflife' of a title from disappearing into obscurity?'

Great again. Why haven't publishers done it? Well, academic publishers have and are managing to extend the lives of scholarly monographs significantly. General book publishers have been much slower. The first and most obvious and most solvable reason for this is cost. Print on demand has been significantly more expensive than conventional printing. Expensive scholarly books can stand that extra cost and still be commercially viable. £5 paperback novels cannot. But that will change and cost will become a much less significant barrier.

The real barrier now is the publisher's relationship with authors. Ironically, there are authors (and authors' societies) who value their books going out of print because this triggers a reversion clause allowing them to annul the original publisher's contract and resell the titles to the publishing market-place. With print on demand there is no such thing as 'out of print' and thus no opportunity to revert rights. In actual fact, there are very few instances of authors benefitting from the reversion clause because usually there is a very good reason the title went out of print - there was no demand - but one can understand why an author would not want to be shackled to a publisher who cared not a jot for their books. There is a lot of noise around this issue and the various trade and author associations are trying to find a way through with little success so far. Meanwhile, technology advances and Picador still doesn't have its full backlist available using traditional AND print on demand. It is very frustrating, not just for Clive Keeble but for publishers too.

And while on Picador I was delighted to see this badly-reproduced photo. It is a spread from Grafik 150 celebrating the 150th issue of the influential design magazine of the same name.

The featured covers are from Picador proof copies. Henry Hobson has written:

'After being given one of these as a random present, I have become more and more obsessed with them. Picador's proof copies, or advance reading copies, have an understated beauty about them which you just can't find in most "designed" books....However, the main inspiration comes from the books' plainness - the empty unfinished covers can't fail to inspire. Knowing that they'll never make it onto a retailer's shelves, they feel like they've been made for my eyes only.'

I agree but wonder why we don't dispense with the designed covers and simply publish with the beautiful proof covers even if it destroys Mr Hobson's my-eyes-only reverie.