How Online Book Printing has Changed the Writing World

The worldwide reach of the Internet has impacted book printing, just like it has every other industry in the world. With books being available in digital form, downloadable at any time and in any of a number of formats, online access has even changed the definition of the word “book.” According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, book means:

a : “a set of written sheets of skin or paper or tablets of wood or ivory,” or
b : “a set of written, printed, or blank sheets bound together into a volume.”

A book used to be something you held in your hands and stuck bookmarks in when you put it down. You piled them up by the bed at night and all over the room when you were writing a research paper. “Curling up with a good book” was a description of a comfortable, relaxing activity for almost anyone.

Now a book can be read on a computer, listened to while driving down the road or jogging, or even read on an electronic device designed especially for that purpose, but which can hold thousands of books in the space and weight of a single paper volume. .

In all fairness, Merriam-Webster also defined “book” as follows:
c : “a long written or printed literary composition.”

This meaning still applies to online publications, so we can still call them books when they are issued in digital form, even if we can’t browse through them the same as we used to. In addition to making books much more portable and searchable, digital publishing makes life much easier on new authors.

Traditionally, a writer had to send out copy after copy of a manuscript to publishers, who would evaluate it based on their belief that it would sell. Now they will often expect the writer to do their own online book printing and to sell books before they pick up the project. Self-publishing no longer carries the stigma that the work was deemed “unpublishable.”

These days, many books start out that way. Self-publishing with online printers has many advantages for authors, starting with the ability to print “on demand” rather than doing a print run of a number of copies and having to pay for them all whether they sell or not. There are online printing services that will also handle distribution, including getting the book in stores and to public libraries.

The author can also self-publish without having to manage inventory and pack and ship books when they are ordered. Online publishers can print, bind, and ship the book to the customer, and the writer still makes more money than he or she would in a traditional publishing agreement.

Where a publishing house in the old school would, in many cases, pay an author one dollar or less per book sold, online publishing commonly allows the author to make $4 to $9 per book – much more in some cases.

Under the old model, authors were sometimes paid only when their earnings reached a specified level, which sometimes meant that they did not get paid. The way online publishing is structured now, authors can arrange to get paid as often as they wish.