Print on demand

Print on demand is a business model in which items such as books or printed apparel are manufactured only after a customer places an order, rather than being produced in bulk and held in inventory in advance. The approach only became commercially practical once digital printing technology matured enough to make single-copy production affordable, superseding earlier low-quality methods such as mimeographs and photocopiers; the concept itself had been envisioned as early as 1966 by science fiction editor Frederik Pohl, who imagined machines that could produce a book to order anywhere in the world. It is used today by academic publishers maintaining large backlists, self-publishing platforms, and publishers reprinting out-of-print titles, all without the cost of warehousing finished stock.