Question
How will the rise of print-on-demand services affect our opinions of books that are self-published, particularly in academia?
Answer
Academic book publishing has been in deep trouble for longer than regular book publishing, since it was always a game of very small volumes. So paradoxically, it actually has much less to fear, and a lot more to gain from POD I believe.
I think the major academic publishers may adopt POD soon for a lot of their catalogs. If they aren't already thinking of it, they should. By contrast, high-volume mainstream publishers don't need the low volume advantages of POD for their new titles (since the cost of offset is drastically lower if you are sure you can sell more than a couple of thousand copies of anything). For them the big advantage of POD lies in the backlist of titles that are past their initial sales.
At some point, as sales dwindle, mainstream publishers should (and some already do) automatically trigger POD operations. The infrastructure is there (the biggest distributor, Ingram, also owns the biggest POD operation, LightningSource).
As for perceptions of POD... that's an entirely unrelated variable. You are conflating the self/vanity/regular publishing axis with POD vs. offset (the technology axis). Self-publishers can use offset, and regular publishers can use POD. Both happen. The reason it is easy to conflate the two independent axes is that POD is more cost-effective at low volumes, with lower capital costs, so naturally self-publishers are more likely to choose it, since they expect, and can make their money back, at lower volumes.
So your question of perceptions is really about self-publishing, whatever the print technology. If you are a star academic and get your book properly peer reviewed by a star panel of reviewers, and you have a grad student do the legwork of setting up POD... absolutely no reason why you should suffer for cutting an academic publisher out of the loop (academic publishers offer little/zero editorial support anyway, and it is academics themselves who do all the editing etc.).
If you are a beginning researcher, especially in the humanities, trying to get your thesis published as a book... then self-publishing will have no credibility, since the acceptance by the acquisitions editor of a major university/acad press is actually the validation that is being signaled. But again, POD vs. offset is completely irrelevant. Your press may choose either. The question is much less relevant for the sciences/engineering, since researchers in those fields typically don't write single-author books unless they personally want to. All the action is in journal papers.
(to a lesser extent, this whole answer applies to e-books as well. Many smaller journals are going all-electronic, but there is still cachet attached to print versions of books).
Disclosure: I work for Xerox, and we make POD equipment that is used by several major POD vendors.
I think the major academic publishers may adopt POD soon for a lot of their catalogs. If they aren't already thinking of it, they should. By contrast, high-volume mainstream publishers don't need the low volume advantages of POD for their new titles (since the cost of offset is drastically lower if you are sure you can sell more than a couple of thousand copies of anything). For them the big advantage of POD lies in the backlist of titles that are past their initial sales.
At some point, as sales dwindle, mainstream publishers should (and some already do) automatically trigger POD operations. The infrastructure is there (the biggest distributor, Ingram, also owns the biggest POD operation, LightningSource).
As for perceptions of POD... that's an entirely unrelated variable. You are conflating the self/vanity/regular publishing axis with POD vs. offset (the technology axis). Self-publishers can use offset, and regular publishers can use POD. Both happen. The reason it is easy to conflate the two independent axes is that POD is more cost-effective at low volumes, with lower capital costs, so naturally self-publishers are more likely to choose it, since they expect, and can make their money back, at lower volumes.
So your question of perceptions is really about self-publishing, whatever the print technology. If you are a star academic and get your book properly peer reviewed by a star panel of reviewers, and you have a grad student do the legwork of setting up POD... absolutely no reason why you should suffer for cutting an academic publisher out of the loop (academic publishers offer little/zero editorial support anyway, and it is academics themselves who do all the editing etc.).
If you are a beginning researcher, especially in the humanities, trying to get your thesis published as a book... then self-publishing will have no credibility, since the acceptance by the acquisitions editor of a major university/acad press is actually the validation that is being signaled. But again, POD vs. offset is completely irrelevant. Your press may choose either. The question is much less relevant for the sciences/engineering, since researchers in those fields typically don't write single-author books unless they personally want to. All the action is in journal papers.
(to a lesser extent, this whole answer applies to e-books as well. Many smaller journals are going all-electronic, but there is still cachet attached to print versions of books).
Disclosure: I work for Xerox, and we make POD equipment that is used by several major POD vendors.