Dorchester Publishing has decided to leave the mass-market paperback business, moving to an eBook-first model followed by a print-on-demand run of trade paperbacks. As the company makes the shift, new trade paperback releases will face a six to eight month delay, but eBooks will be published on time.
Dear Author published an email from the company about the change: “The substantial growth we’ve seen in the digital market in such a short period–combined with the decline of the mass-market business–convinced us that we needed to fully focus our resources in this [eBook] segment sooner rather than later … Just as for mass-market books, stores will place their orders and we will print to fill them. Books will be on the shelves for readers to browse. However, using print-on-demand technology, we will not have to keep as many books in inventory incurring warehousing fees. Books will be available for reorder just as they are now, but we will only have to print as many copies as we need instead of a minimum of 5000.”
The Wall Street Journal covered the publisher’s shift, noting that Dorchester saw “book unit sales” plunge 25 percent last year.