The first unions were precisely those of the printers. These workers have been since the first industrial revolution the aristocracy of the trade unions and the working class. Many of them could read and wielded a lethal weapon: the word printed in thousands of copies. A glorious, coveted, respected and well paid job, that of typography.
But all this seems to have been lost in our time which is increasingly the time of paradoxes and the grotesque. After the digital hangover, people have returned to reading on paper, where words cost money and space for nonsense is limited. She also went back to buying the books. What happens, however, is that there are no longer enough printers to print as many as would be needed. In the United States it happened that during the Christmas season, the happiest season for books, many titles were sold out and publishers were unable to supply bookstores and Amazon with the necessary copies. Those were really lost sales, as readers didn't flock to the digital versions of the same titles, but bought other goods for their gifts. After all, we need to understand them: what gift is an ebook? You can't even wrap it with a red ribbon!
Alexandra Alter, the New York Times book critic, told, with a touch of amazement, the story of books that cannot be printed. And indeed it is surprising, but what can we still wonder about?
Lucrezia Pei translated and adapted Alter's article for our readers. Enjoy the reading!
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A boom year for the publishing industry
This year has been, to everyone's surprise, a blockbuster for the publishing industry. Despite the relentless news reports, readers bought books in droves. Print sales are up, and units sold at independent bookstores are up 5%. More than one title (Fear by Bob Woodward, The President Is Missing, by Bill Clinton and James Patterson, Becoming by Michelle Obama) has passed the milestone of one million copies, but there is also strong interest in fiction.
What should be good news for publishers, agents and authors, however, caused a lot of inconvenience at the crucial moment of the selling season, during the holidays, because printers are struggling to keep up with the surge in demand, which generated backlogs that led to stock shortages of popular stocks.
Some of this year's critical acclaim including Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday The overstory by Richard Powers e The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai they were declared sold out on Amazon in the week before Christmas, after the warehouse ran out of them because publishers couldn't reprint copies fast enough. Critically acclaimed non-fiction best-sellers such as David W. Blight's biography of Frederick Douglass, Samin Nosrat's Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat cookbook, and Ben Reiter's Astroball were also unavailable on Amazon, causing some some titles showed arrival times of two to four weeks.
The industry-wide shutdown had been building for months, as a result of shrinking and consolidating printing companies, the collapse of a major printing house this summer, global paper shortages and a shrinking job market which made it difficult to hire additional seasonal workers. But the block has become increasingly acute and visible at the peak of seasonal sales of the industry, when consumers were on the hunt for must-have titles to give away and found Amazon's virtual shelves empty.
Irretrievably lost sales
For authors whose books sold out in the run-up to the holidays, it can be difficult to recoup lost royalties and the dip in Amazon's rankings. In a Facebook message, Ms. Makkai has encouraged readers to purchase her novel at independent bookstores after Amazon declared it out of stock and indicated it couldn't ship until after Christmas. “This situation sucks and my publicist is doing what they can but, ugh, the timing is really, really bad,” she wrote.
Agents and authors say part of the problem is that publishers and retailers have become more risk-averse. Publishers are printing smaller first runs, in part because retailers order fewer copies initially, waiting to see which titles hit the road, and tend to avoid betting on the wrong ones and getting stuck in unsold inventory. In the past, it was often easy to get another batch of books printed in a week or two if sales of the titles were unexpectedly high, but these days some publishers say it can take as long as a month or two.
Furthermore, the seemingly insatiable appetite of readers for a handful of blockbusters has exacerbated the bottleneck effect in the printing houses, eating away at what little balance there was in the system. Mr. Woodward's Fear has sold nearly two million copies across all formats, while Mrs. Obama's Becoming, which came out in November, has sold 3,8 million copies.
“The production capacity is so tight that if you come across a book that takes off like Becoming you have to stop making them print what they were printing and make them make more copies of Becoming,” said Dennis Abboud, managing director of ReaderLink, the largest book distributor for Target, Walmart and other stores. “And so it happens that the train goes off the rails.”
A handful of bestsellers crashed the system
At the same time, publishers have been caught off guard by the surprise handful of best-sellers, titles by lesser-known authors that are in short supply the week before Christmas, the worst possible time to find yourself running out of stock.
“Suddenly, there's no more stock,” says literary agent Chris Parris-Lamb, who represents Ms. Halliday. “So the books that become anomalies, the ones that really make money, become victims of their own success.”
The backlog is so large that it will have an impact on next year as well, which will cause publishers to move the publication date of some books scheduled for January because they cannot print them in time. At Penguin Random House, at least a dozen releases set for early 2019 have been pushed back, usually by a few weeks, according to the company's admin. Other publishers have stated that the release of some titles will be delayed due to build-ups at print shops.
"Macroscopically, the marketplace is thriving, and there are plenty of books to buy on shelves across America," said Michael Cader, books industry analyst and founder of Publishers Marketplace. "But if it's your book, and there's a demand, and it's out of stock, it hurts a lot. "
Every year during the holiday season, some unexpected book-breaking books sell out while supplies last, frustrating consumers and the authors who wrote them, but leaving the industry as a whole unscathed. But this year the shortcomings are more widespread, and the factors causing them are more systemic and harder to mitigate. “It's more complex than it used to be. You can't count on giving the print shop a call and saying: The book has taken off, let's do a print run this week,” said Adam Rothberg, senior vice president of corporate communications at Simon & Schuster. “This is the new normal for the foreseeable future.”
Madeline McIntosh, managing director at Penguin Random House US said that most of the publisher's hottest titles were available through other outlets, despite being out of stock at major retailers, and noted that "at this time of year , we always try to solve problems related to the soaring demand for trendy books”.
The collapse of the printing houses and the recovery of the demand for books
The biggest cause of the bottleneck effect, say publishers and agents, is the consolidation or collapse of print shops. A large printing company, Edward Brothers Malloy, closed this summer. Next year, two of America's largest printers, Quad Graphics and LSC Communication, are expected to merge, causing publishers to fear a reduction in print services.
The printing industry has its problems, including paper shortages and rising prices. And low unemployment has made it harder for printers to hire extra workers. Quad Graphics, which has 55 print shops and 22.000 employees worldwide, "has faced headcount difficulties due to low unemployment," according to a company spokesperson.
Surprisingly, some of the current chaos stems from the fact that the book industry is not only stable but appears to be thriving. After years of declining print sales, print and paperbacks are up recently, while e-book sales are down. Sales of print editions jumped 3,5% in the first ten months of 2018, while earnings of digital books fell 3%, according to the Association of American Publishers.
In recent years, some large publishers have made investments in print storage and inventory management infrastructure, expanding their warehouses and improving their ability to fulfill incoming orders quickly from stores, but they have very little control. on printing houses, where production capacity has been reduced.
The effects are reverberating throughout the industry. This fall, WW Norton had to jump through hoops to save an author's book tour when they learned that the books would not be available for an October publication date because printers were overbooked. The author, Jamas M. Scott, had more than a dozen events scheduled in October to promote his book Rampace: MacArthur, Yamashita and the Battle of Manila, but the printer couldn't deliver the books until about a month After.
Norton was able to get a small consignment of books to sell at events before the first print run was ready, but at great cost: they had to take loose pages, piece them together by hand and have them bound, shipped overnight to event locations.
"It's a publisher's nightmare," said Josh Glusman, vice president and managing director of Norton.
Norton also struggled to answer unexpected demand for Powers' novel The Overstory, which was released in April with an initial print run of 25.000. Sales continued to climb throughout the year, and were boosted when the novel was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
In mid-October, concerned that supplies would run out just before the holidays, Norton ordered a tenth print run of the book, 10.000 copies more. A rush priority order usually takes two weeks, but Norton was told it would take two months. The new editions arrived in the publisher's warehouse on 17 December, but copies had yet to arrive at outlets in time for the Christmas shopping. Norton just ordered the eleventh printing, which will bring the total number of copies in circulation to 115.000.
Amazon and bookstores are also on tilt
Still, it may be too late for some who are shopping for the holidays. “Demand has pleasantly exceeded expectations,” said Mr. Glusman. “Is there such a thing as 'too much demand'?”
The shortcomings of the printing houses have put large and small points of sale in difficulty, although a large company like Amazon can cushion the impact of lost sales more easily than an independent bookstore.
Barnes & Noble stores have experienced “limited distribution, delays in release dates, and minute-by-minute deliveries arriving just on time, driving up shipping costs,” said Tim Mantel, head of merchandising at Barnes and Noble .
Even independent bookstores have had a hard time answering the question unexpected best-sellers, although many of them have placed larger orders this year expecting to run out of stock over the holiday period.
Catherine Bock, order manager at Parnassus Books in Nashville, said the store is out of a few popular titles, including Asymmetry and Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.
Robert Sindelar, manager of Third Place Books in Seattle, said it has been unusually difficult to stock up on trending titles this year. The outlet of him sold out of the biography of Frederick Douglass before Thanksgiving. He sold all his copies of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat about a week ago. He just got a small batch of them, but they were pre-ordered copies, he said. “We could have sold another hundred.”
Ms Nosrat, whose cookbook came out in April 2017 and has sold nearly 300.000 copies, said she and her agent realized in early December that her book would sell out before the holidays, after a 'further circulation of 30.000 copies.
“It was a punch in the gut,” Nosrat said. “But I am aware that this here is a difficulty that one rarely encounters, and that one is lucky to have.”
Indeed, lucky to have.
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° Alexandra Alter covers the world of publishing and books for the "New York Times". Before joining the New York newspaper's editorial staff in 2014, she edited the books and culture column of The Wall Street Journal, where she was a reporter for seven years. She majored in religion at Columbia University and later pursued a master's degree in religion and journalism from Columbia.
°° Lucrezia Pei, of Narni (Rome), studied at the Faculty of Letters specializing in Languages at La Sapienza University. He translates from English and French and specializes in editorial training. After working at various publishing houses, she translated two volumes of the goProf series for goWare (part of a series dedicated to leadership and literature) and will soon be translating the third, still unpublished. Some of his short stories have been published, under pseudonyms, in various anthologies.
