And how this opened new possibilities for VRI
A lot changed in Pariyatti’s publishing over the 40 years we have been in existence. In the early days, publishing was a capital-intensive labor of love. Thousands of dollars had to be invested upfront to pay for large, offset print runs. The larger the print run, the lower the cost per book, so deciding how many copies to print was always a challenge as we did not want to tie up too much money in inventory, but we wanted to minimize the cost per book.
These large offset print runs left us with many copies of slow-moving books sitting on our shelves for years, and required us to have a large warehouse to store them. Also, shipping books from the USA to customers worldwide was expensive and slow; at times the cost of shipping far exceeded the cost of the books purchased. It required us to have a fully staffed warehouse in a rural area where real estate was more affordable. However, keeping a team staffed in a remote location proved difficult and led to high turnover, which was not conducive to stable operations.
With the advent of print-on-demand technology, that all changed. We were able to start moving our catalog away from large offset print runs and produce books at reasonable prices without having to tie up thousands of dollars in upfront costs. Setting up new titles with our first print-on-demand vendor was still quite complicated, and they could only ship books to our warehouse—essentially just giving us an option for smaller print-runs—but Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) program turbocharged our print-on-demand process. Setting up new books with KDP is streamlined and it allows us to reach customers worldwide by printing copies locally in their regions. We have since been able to reduce our warehousing requirements and have moved to a much smaller warehouse in an urban setting, where there is a larger and more stable employee and volunteer pool to draw from to manage our core warehouse operations.
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The transition to print-on-demand included our catalog of books from the Vipassana Research Institute (VRI). For many years, Pariyatti produced high-quality Western editions of VRI titles, stepping in to fill a gap when imported books from India did not meet the quality standards required by the Western book trade. This was never a commercial effort; we took on publishing these books simply to help VRI’s catalog reach Western students in a durable format.
Once the VRI titles were available via the KDP print-on-demand service, we pointed out the opportunity for VRI to manage their own global distribution. They chose to do so, and Pariyatti has now stepped back from that, as there is no longer a need for us to provide that service. Our role has since evolved into that of a supportive partner facilitating access to their editions. This transition highlights our core value, as our commitment is to the teachings and we are not hung up on a particular model nor our own role in the process.