Founded in Fall 2001 with the assistance of a grant from the Mellon Foundation, the CDDC is a unit of Chicago Distribution Services.
For a publisher that keeps its books at the Chicago Distribution Center, the CDDC offers the advantage of activating a title for automated short-run printing. A publisher decides which of its books should be part of the CDDC's streamlined short-run digital printing (SRDP) program.
CDDC's Digital Print Center, located in the main CDC warehouse, has been designed to simplify the process of making decisions about reprinting books for which demand is modest. The CDC information system detects when an order puts a title that is activated for SRDP (short run digital printing) out of stock and triggers delivery of the book's files from the BiblioVault to CDDC's Digital Print Center. The books are printed within two days and shipped from the CDC warehouse the same day. The concept of this program is that the publisher will make these decisions at the outset, review them once a year and then let the system schedule short-run digital printings as inventory is depleted. The goal of the CDDC is to keep these low-demand books available but to save publishers' staff time for more important (and remunerative) efforts.
To learn more, please contact Jeanne Weinkle, CDDC Manager, at jweinkle@press.uchicago.edu or 773-702-7238.