In an interview with PrintWeek, the print-on-demand (POD) specialist cited the example of Cambridge University Press, which announced in October that it had contracted out its storage and fulfilment to logistics specialist DHL.

He said: "Cambridge University Press has 22,000 POD titles and it has had books in a POD programme for many years."

American technical publisher O'Reilly, which has an estimated turnover of more than $100m (£65.4m), signed over the whole of its inventory management to Lightning Source’s parent company Ingram Content Group last April, in a bid to move the business to a POD model and free up millions of dollars in working capital that they could invest in content.

Taylor added: "Lots of US publishers are looking to get out of distribution so they can spend money on growing their list of titles. They don’t necessarily want to bother about printing books and putting them into a warehouse. That is a clear trend.

"Publishers also have a dilemma over ebooks - do they want to produce ebooks themselves inhouse and build up the necessary infrastructure or spend the money on increasing their list of titles?"

Lightning Source has built is business based on the shift from publishers towards lower print runs and inventory. "We see ourselves as a customer service business which gets content to where it needs to go," explained Taylor.

"The old publishing model – print thousands of copies and then try to sell them – has huge cost implications for cashflow, business costs and risk."

He added that the company was also seeing new publishers enter the market due to the flexibility offered by POD. "We are seeing new micro publishers, small companies that perhaps only publish one or two books, but which had decided to enter the publishing market as the barriers to entry have been reduced; you don’t need a lot of capital to be a book publisher anymore."

Lightning Source, which was founded in 1998, specialises in single book production; it works with more than 2,300 publishers and has more than 7m titles in its digital library.

The company opened its first Australian print on demand plant in Melbourne, in June.