Our Name Program Printing Method Distribution
Our Name
Thoth was the Egyptian god of wisdom and knowledge who gave humankind language and writing and served as the patron god of scribes, libraries and archives. As the god of magic he was also the patron of healers, and as lunar god he represented the moon phases—visible signs of the passage of time and of constant renewal. He was depicted either as a human figure with the head of an ibis or as a baboon. Sometimes he is also referred to as the Egyptian Hermes.
Program
Thoth Books Berlin publishes books for the German- and English-speaking markets—originals and translations—in the following categories:
Fiction, including crime fiction
Cultural and contemporary history
Bilingual editions
Biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs
Printing Method
We are a small publishing house that publishes environmentally friendly “books on demand” at irregular intervals. In contrast to offset printing, with this method printing is not done from printing plates that serve as templates for a specific print run, but from a digital file, where exactly the number of books is printed that is needed—whether it was an order of thousands of copies or of a single book. This saves paper and storage costs and moreover allows for corrections, revisions, and updates at short notice. This technology has been around since the 1990s. By now it has become so advanced that print-on-demand books are virtually indistinguishable as such, both in terms of print image and binding. Obviously, despite lower setup costs, production costs per copy are higher than with offset printing, but publishers no longer have to try to appeal to a mass audience. And finally: since digital templates can be transmitted anywhere in the world, books can also be sold abroad without long order times. (The very first Thoth Books Berlin title, in fact, was ordered by a customer in California, who received it three days later—at list price and without shipping costs.)
Selected titles are also published as e-books.
Distribution
As a small publishing house, we have neither our own warehouse nor our own distribution, as this would considerably drive up our overhead costs, and hence our book prices. For this reason we accepted Amazon’s offer to publish and distribute our titles as part of its Kindle Direct Publishing program (KDP). Unfortunately, at this time no cooperation arrangement is in place between traditional bookstores and Amazon in the German-speaking countries. Consequently, our books must be ordered from Amazon.
Things are different in North America, where titles published via KDP may also be ordered through traditional bookstores. We hope the situation is going to change in this direction in the German-speaking countries, too, so we can continue to enjoy brick-and-mortar bookstores!