How printing on demand benefits the few and the many

A dying breed ... An original printing press. Photograph: David Levene

Those who want, get - at least, that's the motto at Cambridge University Press. Since 1998, CUP has been using print-on-demand technology (POD) - which can turn a digital file into a bound physical object in seconds (Moby-Dick might take a bit longer) - to revive its scholarly back catalogue. If you, like me, have always harbored a hankering to read about Swift's politics or seventeenth-century economics, then now's your chance. You demand. They print.

Or so I'm told; I'm also told it's not quite so simple as that. Actually, it looked impressively smooth but still complicated when, a few years ago, I went to see the factory of wonders where Cambridge's POD books are produced. This is not in Cambridge. Lightning Source, the publisher's partner in crime, is based in Milton Keynes. And yes, you do traverse some roundabouts in order to find the business park where it all happens.

If you then go in and demand to see the factory, then you'll be shown in to a big white room with giant rolls of paper against the wall. Snaking around the middle of the room, various machines quietly get on with churning out thousands of pages a minute and putting them together in the right order. Print works aren't what they used to be. In the time it took to wander nosily around, the machines had knocked out a decent shelf's worth of novels, treatises, textbooks, concordances, monographs ... a lot of books, in any case. Not necessarily the most beautiful books, having the feel, in some cases, of a higher class of photocopy. And colour plates still posed a bit of a problem, the Lightning Sorcerers admitted. But they're working on it ...

Maybe it's all a bit too simple. POD has not been welcomed by everyone. Whatever the benefits for authors and their readers, it is the publishers who stand to gain most from a cost-effective way to print small runs of niche titles, and they have some way to go yet before they calm the anxieties of their authors.

CUP, meanwhile, has proudly announced the publication of its 10,000th POD title, Australian Languages: Their nature and development by Professor Richard Dixon (it first appeared all the way back in 2002; Professor Dixon must be out on the streets of academe right now, high-fiving his mates). POD, says CUP, "has breathed new life in to many long lost titles and allowed a number of niche subjects to be resurrected". And Lightning Source will tell you that it has produced, in its ten-year history, more than 44 million books, from a "library" of over 500,000 titles, on behalf of more than 5,000 publishers. The current pace of production? A million books per month.

And the average print? 1.8 copies. That's a lot of specialist demand.