Bertelsmann has announced that Offset Paperback Manufacturers in Dallas, Pennsylvania is going to close at the end of this month. Once upon a time OPM was reputed to be “the largest paperback book manufacturing plant in the world — employing nearly 1,000 unionized workers, within a 24/7 operation, and capable of producing more than 250 million books per year” Printing Impressions tells us. Work already scheduled for OPM will be transferred to Bertelsmann’s plant in Martinsburg, Virginia.
This is of course tragic for families in and around Dallas (near Scranton/Wilkes Barre) many of whom have worked at OPM since 1972 when it opened. Depressingly it is however nothing more than a reflection of changes in the book market. OPM was set up to do one thing — print long runs of mass-market paperback books — and this is something publishers do less and less frequently nowadays. Bertelsmann, the owners (and owners of Penguin Random House) note that “the Dallas facility, along with its Martinsburg plant, posted a 56% decline in combined mass-market unit production between 2017 and this year, from 149 million units to 65 million” which is expected to drop to 53 million this year. The presses at OPM are ideally suited to printing hundreds of thousands of copies of paperbacks, and while one option might have been to trash all the presses and buy new equipment — just saying that indicates the economic impracticality of such a move. Giant plants producing giant runs are now solidly in the rearview mirror. Books are just not ordered in such quantities any more. Improved inventory control and more frequent reprinting by publishers, including PRH, has forced the book manufacturing industry to revise its equipment mix. And on we go.
Making Book 