In last month's editorial, I chronicled the rise of the Amazon Kindle eBook reader at the ripe old age of 0.5 years. This month, it's time for the annual physical of the old-fashioned printed book. You know, that thing with paper and glue that they sell in the back of coffeeshops named Border's and Barnes & Noble. Just like baseball has an official scorekeeper, so does the book industry. That scorekeeper is a company most readers have never heard of: R.R. Bowker. Not only did they start publishing that tome of tomes, Books In Print, in 1948 but two decades later they became the official agency of the International Standard Book Numbers (ISBN) for the U.S.A. As such, they're the most likely to have the definitive numbers in this ballgame.

So we all kind of waited with baited breath for Bowker's May 28th report on the state of the industry. Such a report can only be released after the first quarter of 2008 in order for the number crunching to be complete. The amount of growth by traditional publishers in new titles year-over-year was less than 1 percent: just 276,649 titles in all. Does this mean the end of the book is near? Has Netflix and the Internet simply crushed the demand for the printed word?

Not so fast! However, the big shocker is that Print on Demand (POD), a method of producing one book at a time, is gaining the lion's share of the book market. In fact, there was a 500% increase in POD category titles between 2006 and 2007. Last year saw 134,773 new titles available by Print On Demand for a total of 411,422 USA titles. Put another way, one out of three new titles was a POD book last year. Given the way that trends are going, I predict that POD titles will match traditional publishing by 2013. Pretty amazing for something that didn't really exist 10 years ago? The revolution has already begun and those old-school publishing barons who don't "get it" are going to be cast aside in a big way. What would Mr. Gutenberg think of books being made one at a time in the 21st Century? I have to imagine he'd be grinning from ear to ear. He was all about barriers to publishing going down and man are they falling fast!

June 2008
Victor R. Volkman
www.LovingHealing.com

"Redefining what is possible for healing mind and spirit"