Amazon.co.jp has announced a new Print-on-Demand (POD) service for Books.
Print-On-Demand reduces risk for publishers and minimises inventory costs while ensuring that customers can always get as many copies of the book(s) as they want. Because of the eliminated costs of inventory, customerrs may in fact have a wider selection of titles available to them.
Using POD, Amazon can rapidly print and ship even a single copy of a book in response to a customer’s order. Titles in the program will always be, so to say, in-stock, allowing customers to benefit from Amazon.co.jp’s shipping offers such as Amazon Prime and Same Day Delivery. Currently there are over 600,000 titles available for printing under the Print-On-Demand facility.
POD makes it possible for Amazon.co.jp to help overseas book publishers sell both their backlist and frontlist in the Japanese market without the expenditure on overseas shipping and local inventory. POD is very convenient to handle issues like out-of-print works, niche titles, custom books, foreign language editions and alternative formats like large print.
Leading publishers like Cambridge University Press, Macmillan, British Library, Taylor & Francis and Springer and others from all over the world are getrting ready to offer their titles through Amazon's POD service.
“We hope to bring hundreds of thousands of books to Amazon.co.jp’s customers that might never have otherwise been available,” said Kazufumi Watanabe, Vice President of Media at Amazon. “Especially in Japan, foreign language books were hard to keep in stock due to their relatively lower demand and longer lead times. By introducing POD, publishers will be enabled to keep all their titles perpetually in stock at Amazon.co.jp. Such an innovative new solution will be a significant benefit to both the publishing industry and our customers.”
We hope the service catches on and that a whole lot of excellent books which have been long out of print will now be back in the market.
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