mass on-demand printing

I was looking just now at a small, low-budget literary magazine, umpteen of which are published and
distributed in colleges, high schools, and coffeeshops across the country. It seems to me that actually publishing one of these, at its most efficient, would involve editing the submissions into a computer file format that a commercial printer could feed more or less directly into its printing systems (taking into account instructions about how to print and bind it, some of which could also be formally encoded). Let's take this system to a logical extreme in which there are machines that accept such files as input and produce complete, printed and bound publications as output. We will call these files "print specfication files", or PSFs for short, and any language in which they are written (a low-level language like PostScript or PDF) a "print specification format" (also PSF).

Note that a PSF represents a clean interface between the creative and mechanical aspects of publishing. It is an interface that reflects the actual division of labor in the production of a small magazine or a corporate newsletter between the editorial staff and writers of the publication, whose job is to produce PSFs, and a (usually separate) commercial printer, whose job is to take the PSFs and produce mass quantities of the publications they describe.

Now, the history of printing economics is all about capital costs and economies of scale. Historically, printing presses have been bulky, expensive, and difficult to operate. Futhermore, printing a document meant manually setting movable metal type into plates; printing then involved dipping these plates in ink and stamping them down onto paper (hence the term printing press). Therefore a huge initial effort was required to set up a document for printing (even after that document had been written and designed to the extent now necessary to produce a PSF), after which an unlimited number of copies could be made at a low marginal cost.

In other words, if I wanted a printer to produce 10,000 copies of a magazine, they would face a large fixed cost of doing so that would not be much higher than that of printing 100 copies, or much lower than printing 100,000 copies. Therefore I will see enormous economies of scale. The revenue I need to generate per issue (via advertising and/or sales) for my magazine to cover printing costs will decrease dramatically as the number of copies I print (and sell) increases.

The practical consequence of this is that in practice it is only feasible to print a financially self-supporting mag pazine at a given level of quality once I reach some critical circulation level, because below this level the price I have to charge per copy to recoup my costs is higher than what people are willing to pay for a magazine. Another consequence is that I need a large amount of start-up capital to print the initial issues of my magazine and distribute them to build circulation. (And such capital is necessary even if creative and editorial staff work for free.)

Desktop publishing was a revolution because the fixed costs of printing things like fliers, newsletters, and smallish magazines (still low quality compared to glossy mass-market magazines or professionally printed books, but acceptable for many purposes) became very low. If I have a laser printer, the cost of printing 100 copies each of 100 different documents will be the same (or only very slightly higher) than the cost of printing 10,000 copies of a single document. This is much, much different from a conventional printing press.

Unfortunately, I don't know the details of modern printing technologies that are higher-end than the kind of laser and ink-jet printers that people have at home or around the office. It seems to me, though, that this new economics of desktop publishing could probably encompass printing and binding a decent-quality glossy magazine, something surpassing the quality of most small-time literary magazines you see today. In other words, the per-issue cost of printing my coffeshop's in-house literary mag should be close to the per-issue cost of printing a mag with much larger circulation at a comparable level of quality.

What I'm getting it is that I should be able to produce a magazine PSF and post it on my website. Somebody else should then be able to find my work on the web, go into their local printer's shop, and have a copy printed out for them, and the price they pay the printer should be around the cost of a conventional magazine they find at a newsstand. This would be mass on-demand printing.