A year ago, when coronavirus was just something we’d heard about happening in Wuhan, we were already wondering about capacity issues in book manufacturing. The business has been undergoing radical changes for decades, and the problems were coming to a head with plant closures and paper shortages.

Then on top of this came coronavirus lockdowns, and for a minute it looked like the whole shebang might fall apart: if there were to be no books to manufacture, then there’d be no manufacturers of books left. But not so fast: although publishers initially delayed a lot of books, after a short time we found out that we were actually able to keep on selling books despite all the problems we were facing. There were a few minutes there where States scratched their heads as to whether printing books was in fact “essential” or not, but that went away as we slid by on the basis that printing many things was obviously essential and it was deemed a good idea to allow all printers to keep on going in to work.

The book manufacturing industry could be said to be “suffering” from three interrelated long-term shifts —

  • a sharp reduction in print runs. Over the last five or ten years publishers have finally figured out (and print technology has enabled them) that printing fewer than a life-time’s supply of a book might not be altogether crazy. Demand planning and supply chain management are no longer just topics in books we publish. We are now reading those books.
  • a reduction in paper making capacity for book papers. You can probably make more money off making a less demanding grade of paper than book paper. Investments in paper making are immense, and tend to fall into cycles which lag the business cycle by a year or two. There are many fewer book paper manufacturers nowadays than when I started out in the business.
  • a technological changeover to digital from offset lithography. Just as lithography represents a productivity boost as against letterpress, so digital takes productivity further. But if you have a plant full of offset presses, you do face a difficult set of investment choices. Any technological change will take years to work its way through the industry as people continue to make money using fully-amortized “old” equipment.

I suspect there’s a pretty direct connection between these trends and the problems which have assailed LSC and Quad Graphics. In crude terms you could argue that such mega-companies were predicated on a regular supply of large print orders from big publishers. Obviously books like the Obama volumes still attract long print runs, but more and more books are being printed in shorter runs with more frequent reprints. Add to that the ease with which a publisher can now change printers: with a digital file as the start point for a printing, the up-front work on any printing is much simplified, and can in principle be done by any company. So if printer A who did the first printing can’t give you a good schedule, then off you go printer B. In the olden days, moving flats was a nightmare. Plants set up for the old dispensation of fewer and bigger printings are challenged.

One big change which coronavirus has brought about is a difference in the way a book is scaled out to the trade. Used to be you’d want to have stacks of books in every bookshop in the world on the day when you finally declared the book published. Doesn’t happen any more (at least not to the same degree) — if there aren’t crowds wandering into stores what’s the point of having piles of books there for them? Online ordering falls into a different pattern — perhaps not one we can define too precisely just yet. This must have a knock-on effect on the book manufacturers as demand for the product is extended over a longer timeframe. Further evidence of this change in sales patterns is provided by the frequent expressions of surprise at the greater and greater importance of back list sales.

Now there are those who believe that 2020-1 will represent the death knell of the print book. Such Jeremiahs will always leap to their favored conclusion. However I think what we have seen over the last year is just how  far people are willing to go to get a physical volume despite all the barriers social distancing impose. I hope I’m not guilty of leaping to my favored conclusion when I suggest that this scarcely seems evidence of people finally concluding that ebooks are the only way in which books should be supplied.

Printing Impressions has an article with the thoughts of four book manufacturers.

In 2015 I held forth on this topic.