The Publishing Industry Faces Numerous Difficulties With On-demand Printing; Let's Look At How The Science Press Breaks Through!

On August 28, the 21st 'Digital Printing in China' Technology Development Forum 2025 was successfully held in Zhengzhou, Henan. At the meeting, Chen Liang, Deputy General Manager of China Science and Technology Press Media Co., Ltd., delivered an excellent speech titled 'Print on Demand: Exploration and Progress of Science Press.' He introduced the development overview of Science Press, analyzed the common problems faced by the publishing industry and the necessity of promoting print-on-demand, and shared in detail the development and exploration practices of Science Press in the print-on-demand business over the past ten years.

Chen Liang, Deputy General Manager of China Science and Technology Publishing and Media Co., Ltd. The following is the full text of the speech. The Science Publishing House (hereinafter referred to as the "Science Society") was established in August 1954 by the merger of the Compilation Bureau of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Longmen United Bookstore, and is the most comprehensive and largest science and technology publishing house in China. In 2017, the Science Society became the first company among the central publishing houses to be listed on the main board of the Shanghai Stock Exchange. As a publishing house under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Science Society adheres to the publishing style of "three highs and three stricts", and publishes a series of academic achievements representing the highest level of scientific research in China, including more than half of the winners of the highest national science and technology award and more than 70% of academicians. Most of the foundational works of various disciplines in New China are also published by the Science Society, witnessing and recording the history and brilliant achievements of science and technology in New China. In 2024, the Science Society will publish 3,325 new books and 751 journals annually, with an annual revenue of nearly 3 billion yuan and a net profit of 500 million yuan, ranking 37th among the top 50 publishing in the world and 8th in the top 10 science and technology publishing in the world. As a member of the three central publishing groups, the Science Society has won almost all the honors that domestic publishing houses can get. Why Publishing Houses Should Promote Print-on-Demand 01 Common Problems Faced by the Publishing Industry (1) The number of publishing varieties has increased, but the average print volume of a single product has shown a downward trend. (2) Professional book sales have the characteristics of long tail effect. (3) Academic journal sales have formed a model dominated by digital editions and supplemented by paper editions. (4) The production and operation costs of books and periodicals continue to grow, bringing continuous pressure to the operation of publishing units. (5) The rapid growth of inventory brought about by continuous scale growth has continuously increased the loss of asset impairment. (6) The sales link, especially the terminal market and the library matching market, put forward higher requirements for order fulfillment rate and production efficiency, and need to be able to adapt to the market's needs for order-based production on the basis of the original stocking production mode of the publishing house. (7) Energy conservation and environmental protection requirements. 02 Reasons for the Science Society to promote print-on-demand Science Society is one of the first publishing houses in China to take print-on-demand printing as a key strategy for enterprise development and promote it throughout the society. After more than 10 years of development, the Science Society has formed a very mature system of on-demand printing operation and production. There are three main reasons why the Science Society promotes print-on-demand. (1) Respond to the new situation and pattern faced by the publishing industry since the 21st century. The above development situation of the publishing industry has forced the Science Society to change the production and stocking model based on traditional printing and the traditional business model based on this model. (2) Benchmark international science and technology publishing benchmarking enterprises and continuously improve their own operation and competitiveness. World-class technology publishing companies such as Elsevier and Springer have already fully introduced on-demand printing, completing the transformation of digital and knowledge service publishing based on digital products and supplemented by paper books. The strategic choice of international science and technology publishing benchmark enterprises points out the direction for the Science Society. (3) Requirements for promoting high-quality development of enterprises. Listed publishing enterprises must withdraw impairment provisions for inventory books according to a specific percentage of code Yang from the second year of book publication, and must be withdrawn in three years. The impairment provision withdrawn is deducted from the company's profit. Therefore, inventory control has a huge impact on business performance. The impairment provision of the Science Society in 2018 was more than 50 million yuan, but through a series of measures such as on-demand printing, the impairment provision for inventory price decline in 2022 only increased by 22 million yuan. The reduced inventory impairment provision accounted for about 1% of total revenue, but accounted for 4%~5% of profit. From the beginning, the Science Society recognized that print-on-demand printing is not the same as digital printing, and promoting on-demand printing is not just a simple transition from traditional printing to digital printing. It is a publishing house business model change involving the overall situation, is a system engineering of enterprise innovation, must be viewed from the height of enterprise development strategy, do a good job in top-level design, drive innovative publishing and production organizational structure with realistic and feasible business model changes, form a professional team, standardize the processes and electronic documents of all links of production and operation, and achieve the best matching and coupling of people, platforms and equipment. At the same time, it is necessary to establish a long-term win-win supplier system and build a healthy industrial chain ecology. The reason why some publishing houses are not successful in doing on-demand printing is that it is promoted as a form of printing rather than a change in business model, as a matter of the production department rather than the strategy of the entire publishing house; second, it is only regarded as an order-based production method for out-of-print books, and not as a mainstream stocking method. In this way, it is difficult to make it bigger, and there is a lack of scale effect, and the cost of counterpart printing factories cannot be reduced, so there is no price advantage for publishing houses to carry out POD. Business Exploration and Practice of Science Society 01 Development History of Digital Printing Business The digital printing of Science Society was fully launched in 2014. At the beginning, it mainly started from exploring order-based production, that is, simplified POD production. In 2015, a unified printing document management system was established, and the printed document library and document collection client were launched. In 2016, the POD intelligent production platform and self-built production line were launched; 2019 is a milestone in the promotion of on-demand printing by the Science Society, with digital printing accounting for 56% of the new book varieties in the society, more than half, and more than 60,000 digital printing times; After the launch of the new ERP system in 2024, the total number of digital printing cycles will be about 80,000 times and the total number of copies will be about 4.8 million copies, accounting for more than 70% of the new book varieties, and digital printing has become the mainstream method of production. The model change of print-on-demand has enabled the Science Society to achieve sustainable development under the pressure of fierce competition and drastic industry market changes, and the shipping inventory ratio has been more than two times since 2019. This is still remarkable in publishing houses that mainly focus on academic books. 02 Self-built production line The self-built production line played a key supporting role during the launch of the on-demand printing model change. The line was launched in 2015 and commissioned in 2016. In the early stage, it was mainly to meet the printing business of ultra-short editions of short editions in the society, and at the same time, when the business volume and production capacity did not match, the stocking of short paperback books was taken into account. The so-called simplified version of POD books is a book printed with digital printing equipment after simplifying and standardizing the original special frame form of published books in order to adapt to digital printing equipment faster and better. After the simplification, the book recalculates the cost and sets a new price. The production capacity design index of planning self-built production line is to produce and send out the books required by the order within three days, so as to achieve sales and improve the order satisfaction rate. For this reason, the Science Society specially designed the POD intelligent production system, which has officially obtained the software copyright and won the "Digital Publishing Innovation Award" at the 2017 China Beijing International Cultural and Creative Industry Expo. Print-on-demand and simplified books do not imply low quality. In 2021, the "Physics Dictionary" produced by the Science Society's self-built production line won the "8th China Printing Award" in 2021, which strongly proves this. 03 Build a win-win industrial chain ecology Building a win-win industrial chain ecology is an important part of the implementation of the print-on-demand model. With the joint efforts of publishing houses and printing factories, more and more printing factories can support on-demand printing, with continuous improvement of quality and rapid cost reduction, especially the rapid iteration of inkjet rotational printing, which strongly supports the development of on-demand printing business. In 2017~2024, the proportion of inkjet rotation and laser paperback in digital printed books of the Science Society changed from 7:3 to 96:4. In terms of the proportion of business undertakings, the proportion of self-built production lines has dropped from 12% to 2%, and only a very small number of emergency tasks are undertaken. Outsourcing has accounted for 98%. The cost of a single book printed on demand has also increased significantly from significantly higher than that of traditional printing, to almost the same, and the cost balance point of on-demand printing has also continued to increase, and now the stock of general books can be tied with traditional printing in 1,000 or even less than 1,500 copies. This provides a broader space for the expansion of the print-on-demand model and lays a good foundation for the transformation and upgrading of publishing houses. The integration of one book, one code and print-on-demand If print-on-demand is one of the most important strategic measures taken by the Science Society in terms of production and operation in the past 10 years, then the full-variety one-book-one-code action launched in 2024 and officially implemented in 2025 may be another strategic change that the Science Society can compete with print-on-demand in the next five years. 01 Fully implement the role of one book, one code The so-called action of one book and one code for all varieties is to affix an independent and unique identity identity to each copy of each book published. Its main purpose is to prevent piracy; second, as a value-added service supporting digital resources of books; third, to realize the traceability of the whole chain of book production and circulation; fourth, anti-diversion control; Fifth, establish big data reader analysis. In addition, one of the most important functions is to link electronic resources to establish a channel and bridge between paper books and the digital products and services of publishing houses for user identification and drainage. Identify, record, and build a publisher's user pool by attracting users to sign up, and drive traffic to the publisher's digital products and services. 02 Background of promoting the full implementation of one book and one code Why should we implement one book and one code for all varieties? The background is mainly as follows. (1) Ensure the amount of teaching materials. The liberalization of textbook procurement has led to students not buying books and using second-hand books, and piracy is prevalent. (2) Crack down on piracy. Intentionally or unintentionally, some e-commerce platforms have proliferated pirated books and illegal electronic scanned editions. (3) Draining traffic for publishers' own online content products and services. Nowadays, the number of people reading paper books is rapidly decreasing, and more and more people are doing e-reading. These two more and one little have dealt a heavy blow to the traditional sales revenue of publishing houses. How to divert loyal readers in the era of paper books to their new digital products through certain channels and methods? One book and one code is a solution. Many publishing houses have adopted one book and one code for some book varieties or categories, and scan the code to obtain digital resources to attract readers to buy genuine books and introduce their traffic into online products. These attempts have achieved good results and formed a trend. But in general, due to the lack of promotion of the whole variety, its implementation effect is greatly limited. The most important reason is that without the implementation of full variety coding, whether it is dealers, readers or management departments, whether it is a book code, it cannot form a stable expectation, so it is difficult to cultivate the habit of scanning the code. As a result, preset functions such as genuine product identification, value-added services, product tracking, and user diversion are difficult to implement. The implementation of all varieties, one book, one code can form a stable expectation, so that the discovery of piracy in each link is more clear at a glance, with code is genuine, and without code is pirate, so that paper books with electronic resources become standard, and at the same time simplify product tracking and user tracking, providing a solid foundation for the integration of paper and electricity. 03 The business process of the Science Society Since the second half of 2024, the Science Society has carefully studied the pros and cons of the full implementation of one book and one code, clarified the path and method of fully implementing one book and one code, and formed a complete plan. The Science Society has built 7 system function modules, opening up many links from production to storage and transportation, from editing to sales, from storage and transportation to distribution and withdrawal, from digital resource design to drainage link development, forming a full-chain solution with one book and one code as the core and opening up the integration of paper and number. 04 Implementation effect Since its launch in early 2025, the Science Society's One Book, One Code System has ordered 10 million labels, more than 1.5 million codes, and more than 1,200 books have been coded within half a year. All 34 printing factories and storage and transportation departments have installed one book and one code client to realize the collection and storage of one book and one code. Among them, 10 printing factories have achieved automatic collection of assembly lines, installed specialized equipment such as double-head collection and book distribution lines, and deployed intelligent sorting systems to realize the three-level data binding of the original order logistics, so that the arrival punctuality rate has reached 98.5%. By obtaining registered user data to realize the construction and drainage of user pools, the Science Society has realized the transfer of offline users to online, the traceability of production, delivery and return, the traceability of the whole life cycle of products, piracy warning, diversion warning, encryption and anti-theft of digital resources. By deploying a one-book-one-code system, the Science Society has built a management board covering product management, user management, real-time production monitoring, inventory delivery control, channeling management, return management, product warehousing and return management. It should be emphasized that in terms of returns, due to the implementation of all varieties, one book, one code, the Science Society may achieve return settlement according to the shipping discount of each book, rather than managing by variety, which can further refine the granularity of return management. Chen Liang, Deputy General Manager of China Science and Technology Publishing and Media Co., Ltd. The following is the full text of the speech. The Science Publishing House (hereinafter referred to as the "Science Society") was established in August 1954 by the merger of the Compilation Bureau of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Longmen United Bookstore, and is the most comprehensive and largest science and technology publishing house in China. In 2017, the Science Society became the first company among the central publishing houses to be listed on the main board of the Shanghai Stock Exchange. As a publishing house under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Science Society adheres to the publishing style of "three highs and three stricts", and publishes a series of academic achievements representing the highest level of scientific research in China, including more than half of the winners of the highest national science and technology award and more than 70% of academicians. Most of the foundational works of various disciplines in New China are also published by the Science Society, witnessing and recording the history and brilliant achievements of science and technology in New China. In 2024, the Science Society will publish 3,325 new books and 751 journals annually, with an annual revenue of nearly 3 billion yuan and a net profit of 500 million yuan, ranking 37th among the top 50 publishing in the world and 8th in the top 10 science and technology publishing in the world. As a member of the three central publishing groups, the Science Society has won almost all the honors that domestic publishing houses can get. Why Publishing Houses Should Promote Print-on-Demand 01 Common Problems Faced by the Publishing Industry (1) The number of publishing varieties has increased, but the average print volume of a single product has shown a downward trend. (2) Professional book sales have the characteristics of long tail effect. (3) Academic journal sales have formed a model dominated by digital editions and supplemented by paper editions. (4) The production and operation costs of books and periodicals continue to grow, bringing continuous pressure to the operation of publishing units. (5) The rapid growth of inventory brought about by continuous scale growth has continuously increased the loss of asset impairment.

(6) The sales link, especially the terminal market and the library matching market, put forward higher requirements for order fulfillment rate and production efficiency, and need to be able to adapt to the market's needs for order-based production on the basis of the original stocking production mode of the publishing house. (7) Energy conservation and environmental protection requirements. 02 Reasons for the Science Society to promote print-on-demand Science Society is one of the first publishing houses in China to take print-on-demand printing as a key strategy for enterprise development and promote it throughout the society. After more than 10 years of development, the Science Society has formed a very mature system of on-demand printing operation and production. There are three main reasons why the Science Society promotes print-on-demand. (1) Respond to the new situation and pattern faced by the publishing industry since the 21st century. The above development situation of the publishing industry has forced the Science Society to change the production and stocking model based on traditional printing and the traditional business model based on this model. (2) Benchmark international science and technology publishing benchmarking enterprises and continuously improve their own operation and competitiveness. World-class technology publishing companies such as Elsevier and Springer have already fully introduced on-demand printing, completing the transformation of digital and knowledge service publishing based on digital products and supplemented by paper books. The strategic choice of international science and technology publishing benchmark enterprises points out the direction for the Science Society. (3) Requirements for promoting high-quality development of enterprises. Listed publishing enterprises must withdraw impairment provisions for inventory books according to a specific percentage of code Yang from the second year of book publication, and must be withdrawn in three years. The impairment provision withdrawn is deducted from the company's profit. Therefore, inventory control has a huge impact on business performance. The impairment provision of the Science Society in 2018 was more than 50 million yuan, but through a series of measures such as on-demand printing, the impairment provision for inventory price decline in 2022 only increased by 22 million yuan. The reduced inventory impairment provision accounted for about 1% of total revenue, but accounted for 4%~5% of profit. From the beginning, the Science Society recognized that print-on-demand printing is not the same as digital printing, and promoting on-demand printing is not just a simple transition from traditional printing to digital printing. It is a publishing house business model change involving the overall situation, is a system engineering of enterprise innovation, must be viewed from the height of enterprise development strategy, do a good job in top-level design, drive innovative publishing and production organizational structure with realistic and feasible business model changes, form a professional team, standardize the processes and electronic documents of all links of production and operation, and achieve the best matching and coupling of people, platforms and equipment. At the same time, it is necessary to establish a long-term win-win supplier system and build a healthy industrial chain ecology. The reason why some publishing houses are not successful in doing on-demand printing is that it is promoted as a form of printing rather than a change in business model, as a matter of the production department rather than the strategy of the entire publishing house; second, it is only regarded as an order-based production method for out-of-print books, and not as a mainstream stocking method. In this way, it is difficult to make it bigger, and there is a lack of scale effect, and the cost of counterpart printing factories cannot be reduced, so there is no price advantage for publishing houses to carry out POD. Business Exploration and Practice of Science Society 01 Development History of Digital Printing Business The digital printing of Science Society was fully launched in 2014. At the beginning, it mainly started from exploring order-based production, that is, simplified POD production. In 2015, a unified printing document management system was established, and the printed document library and document collection client were launched. In 2016, the POD intelligent production platform and self-built production line were launched; 2019 is a milestone in the promotion of on-demand printing by the Science Society, with digital printing accounting for 56% of the new book varieties in the society, more than half, and more than 60,000 digital printing times; After the launch of the new ERP system in 2024, the total number of digital printing cycles will be about 80,000 times and the total number of copies will be about 4.8 million copies, accounting for more than 70% of the new book varieties, and digital printing has become the mainstream method of production. The model change of print-on-demand has enabled the Science Society to achieve sustainable development under the pressure of fierce competition and drastic industry market changes, and the shipping inventory ratio has been more than two times since 2019. This is still remarkable in publishing houses that mainly focus on academic books. 02 Self-built production line The self-built production line played a key supporting role during the launch of the on-demand printing model change. The line was launched in 2015 and commissioned in 2016. In the early stage, it was mainly to meet the printing business of ultra-short editions of short editions in the society, and at the same time, when the business volume and production capacity did not match, the stocking of short paperback books was taken into account. The so-called simplified version of POD books is a book printed with digital printing equipment after simplifying and standardizing the original special frame form of published books in order to adapt to digital printing equipment faster and better. After the simplification, the book recalculates the cost and sets a new price. The production capacity design index of planning self-built production line is to produce and send out the books required by the order within three days, so as to achieve sales and improve the order satisfaction rate. For this reason, the Science Society specially designed the POD intelligent production system, which has officially obtained the software copyright and won the "Digital Publishing Innovation Award" at the 2017 China Beijing International Cultural and Creative Industry Expo. Print-on-demand and simplified books do not imply low quality. In 2021, the "Physics Dictionary" produced by the Science Society's self-built production line won the "8th China Printing Award" in 2021, which strongly proves this. 03 Build a win-win industrial chain ecology Building a win-win industrial chain ecology is an important part of the implementation of the print-on-demand model. With the joint efforts of publishing houses and printing factories, more and more printing factories can support on-demand printing, with continuous improvement of quality and rapid cost reduction, especially the rapid iteration of inkjet rotational printing, which strongly supports the development of on-demand printing business. In 2017~2024, the proportion of inkjet rotation and laser paperback in digital printed books of the Science Society changed from 7:3 to 96:4. In terms of the proportion of business undertakings, the proportion of self-built production lines has dropped from 12% to 2%, and only a very small number of emergency tasks are undertaken. Outsourcing has accounted for 98%. The cost of a single book printed on demand has also increased significantly from significantly higher than that of traditional printing, to almost the same, and the cost balance point of on-demand printing has also continued to increase, and now the stock of general books can be tied with traditional printing in 1,000 or even less than 1,500 copies. This provides a broader space for the expansion of the print-on-demand model and lays a good foundation for the transformation and upgrading of publishing houses. The integration of one book, one code and print-on-demand If print-on-demand is one of the most important strategic measures taken by the Science Society in terms of production and operation in the past 10 years, then the full-variety one-book-one-code action launched in 2024 and officially implemented in 2025 may be another strategic change that the Science Society can compete with print-on-demand in the next five years. 01 Fully implement the role of one book, one code The so-called action of one book and one code for all varieties is to affix an independent and unique identity identity to each copy of each book published. Its main purpose is to prevent piracy; second, as a value-added service supporting digital resources of books; third, to realize the traceability of the whole chain of book production and circulation; fourth, anti-diversion control; Fifth, establish big data reader analysis. In addition, one of the most important functions is to link electronic resources to establish a channel and bridge between paper books and the digital products and services of publishing houses for user identification and drainage. Identify, record, and build a publisher's user pool by attracting users to sign up, and drive traffic to the publisher's digital products and services. 02 Background of promoting the full implementation of one book and one code Why should we implement one book and one code for all varieties? The background is mainly as follows. (1) Ensure the amount of teaching materials. The liberalization of textbook procurement has led to students not buying books and using second-hand books, and piracy is prevalent. (2) Crack down on piracy. Intentionally or unintentionally, some e-commerce platforms have proliferated pirated books and illegal electronic scanned editions. (3) Draining traffic for publishers' own online content products and services. Nowadays, the number of people reading paper books is rapidly decreasing, and more and more people are doing e-reading. These two more and one little have dealt a heavy blow to the traditional sales revenue of publishing houses. How to divert loyal readers in the era of paper books to their new digital products through certain channels and methods? One book and one code is a solution. Many publishing houses have adopted one book and one code for some book varieties or categories, and scan the code to obtain digital resources to attract readers to buy genuine books and introduce their traffic into online products. These attempts have achieved good results and formed a trend. But in general, due to the lack of promotion of the whole variety, its implementation effect is greatly limited. The most important reason is that without the implementation of full variety coding, whether it is dealers, readers or management departments, whether it is a book code, it cannot form a stable expectation, so it is difficult to cultivate the habit of scanning the code. As a result, preset functions such as genuine product identification, value-added services, product tracking, and user diversion are difficult to implement. The implementation of all varieties, one book, one code can form a stable expectation, so that the discovery of piracy in each link is more clear at a glance, with code is genuine, and without code is pirate, so that paper books with electronic resources become standard, and at the same time simplify product tracking and user tracking, providing a solid foundation for the integration of paper and electricity. 03 The business process of the Science Society Since the second half of 2024, the Science Society has carefully studied the pros and cons of the full implementation of one book and one code, clarified the path and method of fully implementing one book and one code, and formed a complete plan. The Science Society has built 7 system function modules, opening up many links from production to storage and transportation, from editing to sales, from storage and transportation to distribution and withdrawal, from digital resource design to drainage link development, forming a full-chain solution with one book and one code as the core and opening up the integration of paper and number. 04 Implementation effect Since its launch in early 2025, the Science Society's One Book, One Code System has ordered 10 million labels, more than 1.5 million codes, and more than 1,200 books have been coded within half a year. All 34 printing factories and storage and transportation departments have installed one book and one code client to realize the collection and storage of one book and one code. Among them, 10 printing factories have achieved automatic collection of assembly lines, installed specialized equipment such as double-head collection and book distribution lines, and deployed intelligent sorting systems to realize the three-level data binding of the original order logistics, so that the arrival punctuality rate has reached 98.5%. By obtaining registered user data to realize the construction and drainage of user pools, the Science Society has realized the transfer of offline users to online, the traceability of production, delivery and return, the traceability of the whole life cycle of products, piracy warning, diversion warning, encryption and anti-theft of digital resources. By deploying a one-book-one-code system, the Science Society has built a management board covering product management, user management, real-time production monitoring, inventory delivery control, channeling management, return management, product warehousing and return management. It should be emphasized that in terms of returns, due to the implementation of all varieties, one book, one code, the Science Society may achieve return settlement according to the shipping discount of each book, rather than managing by variety, which can further refine the granularity of return management.