Print on demand

Printing business process An on-demand book printer at the Internet Archive headquarters in San Francisco, California. Two large printers print the pages (left) and the cover (right) and feed them into the rest of the machine for collating and binding. Depending on the number of pages, printing may take 5 to 20 minutes. Print on demand (POD) is a printing technology and business process in which products are produced only after an order is placed, rather than in advance in bulk. While other industries established the build-to-order business model, POD for books and documents could only develop after the beginning of digital printing, as it was not economical to print single copies using traditional printing technologies such as letterpress and offset printing. For apparel and similar physical goods, traditional textile decoration methods such as screen printing require the preparation of a separate screen for each color and design, a lengthy process that must be repeated for each new job. Digital textile printing methods such as direct-to-garment printing eliminate this preparation step, allowing designs to be applied to individual items without the equipment changeover required by