Large Print Books - Kindle vs POD
If you have ever looked at the large print section of a bookstore you know it is very sparsely stocked. Many of the few available books are religious.
This is understandable with conventional publishing. There is a minimum print run for each book and visually impaired patrons are rare. It makes no commercial sense for a retail book seller to devote valuable shelf space to large print books.
That equation changes in the print on demand world. All that is required to convert a book to large print is a font change. In addition, there may need to be some "widows & orphans" cleanup, but will not take a lot of effort.
In our case, where we plan to use the more powerful InDesign software to format our books, the effort of producing the large print version will be trivial.
However, the business of large print books has probably been destroyed by the arrival of the Kindle and other ebook readers. You can set the Kindle to display text in several sizes including very large.
The unknown is how many potential customers will prefer to read on a Kindle and how many would prefer to have a book they hold in their hand. In addition, the Kindle is still black and white only, so if the book depends on color, the POD version will be best.
Fortunately, this is a case where publishers can offer both with little additional effort. It's a classic case of selling "Less of More" as Chris Anderson's "The long Tail" describes. Since it takes almost no additional time or money to offer both versions, you may as well offer both. Shelf space on the internet is infinite so there is no downside to such a strategy.
This is understandable with conventional publishing. There is a minimum print run for each book and visually impaired patrons are rare. It makes no commercial sense for a retail book seller to devote valuable shelf space to large print books.
That equation changes in the print on demand world. All that is required to convert a book to large print is a font change. In addition, there may need to be some "widows & orphans" cleanup, but will not take a lot of effort.
In our case, where we plan to use the more powerful InDesign software to format our books, the effort of producing the large print version will be trivial.
However, the business of large print books has probably been destroyed by the arrival of the Kindle and other ebook readers. You can set the Kindle to display text in several sizes including very large.
The unknown is how many potential customers will prefer to read on a Kindle and how many would prefer to have a book they hold in their hand. In addition, the Kindle is still black and white only, so if the book depends on color, the POD version will be best.
Fortunately, this is a case where publishers can offer both with little additional effort. It's a classic case of selling "Less of More" as Chris Anderson's "The long Tail" describes. Since it takes almost no additional time or money to offer both versions, you may as well offer both. Shelf space on the internet is infinite so there is no downside to such a strategy.
