Here’s a sign of the times. Oxford University Press’ booth at the American Library Association’s 150th Annual Conference in June in Chicago features nary a book.

Seems like others still believe that libraries are interested in print books! In a nice simultaneous announcement Publishing Perspectives brings us a story under the title “Better Late Than Never: Late Adoption of POD Brings PRH’s Titles to U.S. Libraries” Carlo Carrenho’s piece on late adoption of Print on demand. (It’s the second story there.)

The oddest thing about this story is perhaps that it’s a story at all. Even “anti-book” OUP have been using print-on-demand for years. If Penguin Random House set up lots of backlist titles at Lightning Source then presumably any customer, wholesaler, library, bookstore or even individual could get a copy. “After researching which high-demand books often become unavailable, particularly in libraries’ preferred hardcover format, ILS and PRH have created a set of 200 titles by authors including Harlan Coben, Janet Evanovich, Lisa Gardner, Yaa Gyasi, Paula Hawkins, Debbie Macomber, Anne Perry, Nalini Singh, Gary Shteyngart, and others, whose work will be made available through Lightning Source.”

It makes perfect sense to do this — with POD a book need never go out of print (or should we now say “become unavailable”?)

Carolyn Morris, VP of Ingram Library Services told Publishers Weekly “The beauty of print-on-demand is that we can have all of these books available for order, we can manufacture and ship them the same day, and we can do that without having to allocate valuable shelf space or inventory dollars, which makes it low-risk to offer this breadth of library titles.” Undeniable, but it also makes it low risk period. Maybe PRH really does believe that it’s going to fulfill bookstore trade from conventionally printed inventory held in the warehouse. If they do, surely that’s just overly innocent. POD will always be there to head off out of stocks when their regular inventory runs out. I bet the ILS/PRH program will be expanded quite quickly.