PPB in the era of POD

I was actually not planning to talk about this at all originally, thinking that it was sort of remedial. But in talking to some people I know it would seem that it isn't. Like almost any profession or hobby, there is a lingo and a basic set of knowledge that seems sort of obvious to the people involved in it but is not obvious at all to those on the outside. I barely know the difference between regular pliers and needle nose pliers, so I could hardly fault an electrician for not making the same distinctions I would make when it comes to book production. And I'd hope the folks in production are as lenient on those in other departments. Probably. For whatever reason, even though production departments- that means text layout, cover design, copy editing, picking paper and ink- despite being the most boring job in the industry in my humble opinion it is frequently home to some very cool people.

Regardless, I'd like to address a few of the common misconceptions and lapses in knowledge that could be useful to all of you as authors and book enthusiasts, and would be vital to self publishers and startup publishers.

1: Publishers and printers are not the same thing. Not even close. Publishers do all those things like editing. Marketing. Design. Paying the author. Printers print. That's what they do. That is all they do most of the time. Publishers, at least of books, do not own the printers. They do not have divisions that do their printing. At least, none that I know of. I suppose they COULD, but it just isn't really worth it.
2: Printing is expensive. Traditional publishing likes to have books guaranteed to sell well because, among other things, you get sizable discounts on your variable costs (paper, ink etc.)once you cross a certain threshold. Traditional printing methods have high starting costs, what are known as fixed, make ready or plant costs. Namely, this means the creation of specialized plates and preparing the machinery which is labor intensive- so just to start the print run costs a few thousand dollars. However, the price per unit is much more attractive this way than POD.
3: What's the difference between traditional printing and POD? Traditional printing works by running a set of pages all at once, over and over. For adult books, they'd love to do it in 64, but the chances are they run it in 32. Pick out any book on your shelf that wasn't POD. I can pretty much guarantee that will have a page count that is a multiple of 32- in fact, look around. Maybe you've got some books that have a few blank pages that you never saw a purpose to. That's filling space to make it a multiple of 32. Sometimes extra features like an author's note or a preview of the next book or, (God forbid) back-of-book ads are literally just there to take up space. What happens is that on one giant sheet, they print all of those pages at once, then sort of fold it over to create a "leaf." They print as many as they want, move on to the next and just stick them all together at the end. It sounds complicated to set up, but the speed with which presses can churn out a leaf is staggering. POD by contrast works like the printer you have at home or in the office. It prints page 1-whatever IN ORDER. It's much simpler to keep track of and bind, but it's a slower process. Sort of. Because of the lack of make-ready procedures, it's far faster for short print runs.
4: What's the difference in cost and why use one over the other? Traditional printing requires large sums of money up front to pay for make ready costs as well as paper and ink etc. It offers a far lower cost per unit however, and because of the demands of the retail landscape, you need large quantities at low costs for major commercial products. POD on the other hand has high per unit costs, but requires nothing up front. You only pay anything to the printer when someone orders copies. Larger publishers will sometimes use POD for reprints, or more commonly to bridge a gap between two major print runs if a book is selling like hotcakes and they don't want it to suddenly, even if only temporarily disappear from the market. They still treat it a lot like traditional printing though and order 2,500 copies or however many they need for themselves. If you're a self published author or you're looking to start your own niche publisher or whatever, the beauty of the situation is that it really cuts down the need for your own warehousing. You can certainly order X number of copies for yourself to have on hand, but it's also possible to have it all go through the POD printer. So you don't pay for any paper and ink that doesn't get used. You don't pay anything for warehousing, and POD is generally non-returnable. There is sort of a work around for the consumer. Buying a POD product from Amazon for instance. Pretty sure Amazon buys it on your behalf but lets you return it to them. Pretty sure it's Amazon that eats the cost of that. Ain't customer service grand? Regardless, it removes a lot of risk and lowers barriers to entry for a new niche publisher, but if it might sell 10,000 copies, it still ends up a calculated risk.
5: Is printing POD hard? Um. No. When my brother got married a few years ago, he and his wife made 3 or 4 photo books tailored to different branches of the family, printed a couple copies of each POD. They're actually really nice, and the only difficulty putting them together was the picture-picking process, not the layout. That sort of thing isn't even hard to put together. If anyone's interested, I could even find out which service he used to do it. At the same time, most people don't notice a well designed book, only a poorly designed one. Sure, a designer my start seizing violently when presented with a book written in 12 pt Times New Roman (or 11 pt Callibri) but most people barely notice. They might think "Hey, this text is a little big." but that's about it. So between the simplicity and the average person not viewing a novel as a work of art in the purely spatial-physical sense, normal people can now effectively create decent looking books on their own. It still takes some time and you do have to learn the ropes, especially if you want it to look GOOD, but it's an option now you didn't have before- at least not without spending tons of money.
6: Color printing is done mostly overseas. I won't go much further than that. Just know that if you're looking to do traditional printing for an art book- do it overseas. Hong Kong is a popular place to do it. Or used to be, anyway. These days, I think it's mostly mainland China. That's pretty vital for picture books and things. Color POD is hella expensive. Those photo albums my brother custom made? Like sixty bucks a piece. It's already hard to make a profit in publishing, and it gets really tough when your project requires high quality paper and four color printing. Doing it POD in America is a guaranteed way to ensure that your profitability is nil.
7: Just to touch on it, although this probably only matters to budding designers and production folk- there are two common designations for color. One is RGB- Red Green Blue. This is the sort of color PROJECTED as by a monitor or television. Printing works by REFLECTING colors and they're measured in CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black). Suffice to say if you ever find yourself designing a book, this matters A LOT to traditional printing, and even in POD you need to be aware that the colors don't translate perfectly. Professional designers frequently have several monitors set with different tones etc. to try and get a more accurate interpretation and you better believe that someone will fly out to the printer- no matter where they are to help adjust the colors as needed. One professor told me a horror story about a poorly adjusted photo in a bird encyclopedia that made it look like some other bird entirely and they had the Audubon society up their butts forever about it.