Never, ever let it be said that the illustrious crew at Timber Press isn’t ahead of the curve. Just when I was getting ready to pump out another hubristic diatribe about potential options for horticulture publishers, Timber Press announces the start of its print-on-demand program. Considering that horticulture and gardening book buyers tend to hang onto our volumes for dear life (present company included), usually the only options for finding rarer volumes are to pay a book collector out the nose for an out-of-print edition, or to wait for a funeral of a gardening friend or acquaintance and then camp out in front of the house for the estate sale. (I only wish I were kidding about this. The Czarina regularly looks for odd items at estate sales, and we’ve run into some real pockets of humanity in the process.)
I have to admit that I was getting a bit cynical about print-on-demand books, but a lot of that came from watching the flood in the science fiction and fantasy genres of authors desperately trying to sell their books to each other because nobody else wanted them. This, though, demonstrates the merits of POD and E-books for longterm reproduction and availability of books with sales that can’t justify a standard print run. Now if someone will give this treatment to John Crompton’s The Hunting Wasp…