Some just want‘the satisfaction of holding the book in my hands.’


By MOTOKO RICH Booksellers, hobbled by the economic crisis, are struggling to lure readers. Almost all of the New York publishing houses are laying off editors and cutting costs. Small bookstores are closing. Big chains are laying people off or exploring bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, there is one segment of the industry that is actually flourishing: capitalizing on the dream of would-be authors to see their work between covers, companies that charge writers and photographers to publish are growing rapidly .

Credit for the self-publishing boomlet goes to authors like Jim Bendat, whose book“Democracy’s Big Day,”a collection of historical vignettes about presidential inaugurations, enjoyed a modest burst in sales in the excitement surrounding President Obama’s swearing-in.

After failing to secure a traditional publishing deal in 2000, Mr.Bendat paid $99 to publish his book with iUniverse, a print-on-demand company. He has since sold more than 2,500 copies. IUniverse takes a large cut of each sale of the book, currently on Amazon. com for $11.66.

As traditional publishers look to prune their booklists, self-publishing companies are ramping up their title counts and making money on books that sell as few as five copies, in part because the author, rather than the publisher, pays for things like cover design and printing costs.

In 2008, Author Solutions, which is based in Bloomington, Indiana, and operates iUniverse as well as other print-on-demand imprints including AuthorHouse and Wordclay, published 13,000 titles, up 12 percent from the previous year.

Last month, the company bought a rival, Xlibris. The combined company represented 19,000 titles in 2008, nearly six times more than Random House, the world’s largest publisher of consumer books, released last year.

To be sure, self-publishing is still a fraction of the wider publishing industry. Author Solutions, for example, sold a total of 2.5 million copies last year. Little, Brown sold more than that many copies of“Twilight”by Stephenie Meyer just in the last two months of 2008.

But in an era when anyone can create a blog or post musings on Facebook or MySpace, people still seem to want the tangible validation of a printed book.

“I wanted the satisfaction of holding the book in my hands,”Mr. Bendat said.

As a result of his iUniverse book, the British news channel Sky News asked Mr.Bendat to provide live commentary on Inauguration Day. A group of Washington hotels ordered 500 copies to give to guests who were in town for the event.

“O.K., it’s not a best seller,”Mr.Bendat said,“but I’m happy for what’s happening.”

Nevertheless,“for every thousand titles that get self-published, maybe there’s two that should have been published,”said Cathy Langer, lead buyer for the Tattered Cover bookstores in Denver, who said she had been inundated by requests from self-published authors to sell their books.“People think that just because they’ve written something, there’s a market for it. It’s not true.”