There is a long held belief that publishing a book via POD is somehow a detriment to the ultimate success of that title. I beg to differ. POD, and I have had this discussion numerous times, simply means print the book after demanded/ordered. POD has no bearing on the quality, storyline, editing etc. of the work. Every review that I have received for my books made no mention of wheter my book was POD or not, because the reviewer read a physical book. The only difference is that it was printed and bound in minutes after ordered vs picked, packed and shipped from a warehouse after ordered. The customer does not care, they get a printed book.
POD also does not automatically mean digital laser printing, the quantity required will determine the method of the POD production. Suppose I get an order for 3,000 books from some society that will distribute the books to all of their members. IUniverse may decide to have them printed via offset, but it is still POD.
POD authors are getting traditional deals like Lisa Genova with iUniverse who was paid a $500,000 advance by Simon & Schuster for her book Still Alice.
Returnability is available with POD. If your POD publisher is not offering it, then that is their business decision, not a POD limitation.
The largest limitation is not if your book is POD or not, but if you have access to the market where books are bought. Traditional publishers control the shelves. You could have a room full of offset produced books or order POD books as needed, the challenge to get to the buying public is the same.
In fact a POD setup like LSI removes a lot of burden of getting your books to distributors, listed in books in print and acting as distributor.
By and large the big difference is would you want to shell out the lump sum to get 1,500 or more books printed up front. That quantity is probably where the unit costs of offset goes below a LSI POD book. That amount is about $6,000 as the cost for a 300 page book should be in the $4.00 range per unit. S & S can afford to print 300,000 run length and drive the cost to the $1 range. Thay's where the discounts and 60% sell through mean success.
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