Most publishers don't have the infrastructure in pace to do it, and most rely on simply selling the books to other distributors once they are printed. Marvel (and most other publishers) are not book distributors-that's not their business model. Fantagraphics chose that business model out of necessity-they weren't selling enough copies of their stuff to make it worthwhile for others to handle it, but they had o print enough to take advantage of economy of scale to keep publishing costs affordable, so they had to do something with the overstock and play the long game. Most publishers do not want that end of the business because it is not a profit creator in and of itself. It's high cost and low return unless you're infrastructure and business model are in place for it. It's grunt work and most of these folks are sales and creative folks, not blue collar product handling or middle management supervisor types. 

Could they do it, sure, but the fact they choose not to is an indicator that it is not cost effective to do so when other cheaper options are already out there. 

Publishers are under no obligation whatsoever to keep their stuff in print. They are all looking for evergreen sellers, and when they occur, most take advantage of it, keeping them available, but most collections have a limited shelf life, just like any other book product. For every Harry Potter series or Lord of the Rings book that stays perpetually in print and sells, there are literally thousands of titles that never sell out of their first printing. Publishers have to choose where to tie up their capital and which products to invest in long term, and which to put out there for a single printing sell through. If it took them 2 years to sell out the first printing of 50K copies, probably 75% of those sales came in the first 3-6 months and after that it was a trickle of sales (which is the typical sales curve of the bulk of non-evergreen print products, usually after a year or so the rest of the print run is remaindered anyways and sold off for whatever pittance they can get for it). Why would they go back to print on it? Demand had slowed and they weren't going to get a big sales push on the initial release this time. Sometimes, demand can increase as time passes and a book is out of print, building up so you do get a good initial sales push (back in print for the first time in X number of years marketing helps that), but without that fallow period, a new printing will be a sales dog. If a product
s sales curve follows a different path-i.e. a quicker than expected sell-out or steady sales throughout the printing with no major dip in demand through the life of the print-run, then these are the books they will go back to press on.

Print runs that take years to sell and only trickle out of the warehouse or distribution house tie up capital too long, and these types of business need quicker product turnaround to keep the capital liquid and available to keep producing new products. 

There are a lot of factors to consider-have production costs gone up since the last printing? Does the cover price need to increase to cover additional costs and the factor of economy of scale as the print run is probably smaller than the last one, so costs more before material, storage, or transport cost increases are factored in. How will the higher cover price affect demand and sales-if sales were slowing towards the end, will it sell at all at the higher price point? Will they still make their money back in a reasonable window or will the new printing sales fizzle out leaving them with a bunch of unsalable product. 

Marvel already has year end sales to Diamond to clear out their unsold trades and rock bottom prices-sometimes Diamond passes those deals along to retailers, sometimes not, but if they are basically remaindered the unsold portion of the first print run, there is no way they will be going back to press on that book. 

With the advent of digital, making every book essentially an evergreen book in terms of availability without storage costs and management, I think you will likely see more books go out of print rather than less, as it becomes less feasible to keep borderline sellers in print as well, when what little demand there is can be met digitally. 


But yeah, there are so many factors than do they have the storage facility to keep the boos in print to store them at play in this, and getting such a facility is the easy answer-it's not. It's not even part of the reason why they let books go out of print.


-M