Chapter 1: What insights about book production are revealed in this episode?
This is Planet Money from NPR.
I don't know about you, but every time I pick up a book in a bookstore at a yard sale, the things I'm mostly paying attention to are the words. You know, the title, the author's name, the actual reading material, way more than the physical package they come in. But I had an experience recently that changed all that.
You see, last year, my boss's boss here on the show, my grand boss, he asked if anyone wanted to report out the story behind the making of the Planet Money book to see what it might reveal about the global economic machinery behind every book. I accepted that mission, which is how earlier this year I found myself spelunking deep inside the publishing industrial complex.
I got an invitation to see one of the biggest bookmaking factories in the world, part of the Lakeside Book Company. And stepping into this place felt like stepping into Willy Wonka's factory, but for books. And while I didn't find any bookish Oompa Loompas, I did meet a guy named Chris Moudet. Ironically, extremely chipper. Chris basically grew up at the plant.
I started off in college to be a high school art teacher and then took a gap year. And that gap year has now been almost 39 years with the company.
I come to Chris to help answer this sort of deceptively simple question. Where do books come from? Like, in a material, physical way, what path do they take before they end up on a shelf near you? And his response was to take me on a little tour.
Really, what we're going to do at this point is just walk down...
We head off down a meandering, mile-long path through a series of cavernous warehouses. For my own safety, Chris insists we stay between these little yellow lines on the floor.
It's like a little yellow brick road. Yeah, coming to see the wizard.
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Chapter 2: How does the team navigate the complexities of book manufacturing?
On a great day, we're making upward of three-quarter of a million books. Wow, that's a lot of books. Absolutely.
Lakeside is the biggest Bible producer in the country, but they are also one of the biggest producers of the latest steamy romanticist sensations. Every once in a while, they're entrusted with printing titles so sought after by hordes of ravenous readers, they have to hide them so that nobody could possibly sneak out a copy or get a photo of the cover. We've got our secure cage.
While those books are under embargo, they're kept in a special high-security cage.
We currently do not have anything in there, but that's where we would store anything that had to be kept secret.
Wow, that's the chamber of secrets, huh?
Yeah, well, quite literally.
All around us are signs of this hidden economic web spanning continents, the tendrils of global trade. We walk between towering stacks of enormous paper rolls, like the kind a giant might use on the toilet. Some of this paper has come from forests chopped down in faraway lands.
There are humongous vats of ink with ingredients that have crossed oceans, traversed through ports, and over highways to be here. Walking around this place, it started to dawn on me. Every book is actually a tiny economic miracle. Hello and welcome to Planet Money, I'm Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi.
You may not think about it every day, but every book you see sitting there unassumingly on your local bookstore shelf is the result of thousands of decisions, big and small, tying together vast supply chains and armies of workers from around the world. Today on the show, the second episode in our series, Planet Money sets out to actually make a book.
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Chapter 3: What challenges arise in choosing a printing location for the book?
He's got to take off his businessman's fedora from the world of book proposals and auctions and enter the world of book editing.
You change from being a collector to being a director. So you go from wanting something of like, ooh, I want to buy that. I want it, you know, on my shelf, right? to, all right, how am I going to make this great?
It is now Tom's job, wearing maybe a director's beret, to orchestrate the many parts of the process for turning an idea into a physical book. And the challenge before him is twofold. There is the question of content, like what mixture of words and images will go inside the book. And there's the question of form, like what shape and design should the book physically take?
Well, I think the first is what goes in the book itself.
Yes, the first part of Tom's challenge is figuring out the actual content of the Planet Money book. So Tom organizes a meeting with Alex Goldmark and Alex Mayasi, the person hired to help write the book, to hammer out a plan. As Alex Goldmark explains...
We had to figure out things like, what's the structure of the book? What should our chapters be? Which ones should we do first? Should we write them in order? Should we write the hardest ones first so that we, like, know what we're really getting into?
At first, Alex says they'd been thinking of organizing the book as this sort of economic guide to the forces that shape your life from birth all the way to the end.
The downside of that one, when we thought about it, was then you end on death. It was just a depressing ending.
It also didn't quite leave room for the part of economics that focuses on the big picture, things like inflation or global trade. So they tweak the frame. They add a section introducing readers to the market and its forces, and they organize the rest of the chapters around the big decisions in life, things like work and career, love and family, or saving and investing.
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Chapter 4: How do tariffs and trade regulations impact book production?
Yeah. Alex Maiossi started writing draft chapters. And he would share them with me and Alex Goldmark.
Tom could read so fast. Like, the words go into his brain so fast that he was really able to read a lot quickly. And I would be like, I need to, like, leave my desk, go sit somewhere quiet and focus to actually be able to leave good notes.
There's nothing like reading a chapter that did not exist before and you're the first person on earth to see it. That is extremely exciting. And of course, once you've read it, then you're like, I see a million problems with this. We've got to make this much, much better. You know, some of those things are big.
They're like the structure is wrong or the opening anecdote is not exciting enough or this sentence is confusing, but it's still really exciting.
So, Tom and the Alexes get going on writing and editing new chapters. Now, on to the other part of Tom's challenge, the question of what physical form the Planet Money book should take. There are infinite choices you can make for a book. Alex Goldmark says that at first, they started looking at some of the big picture decisions.
We had to figure out, like, what size was the book? How long should it be? What kind of paper should it be printed on? Is it going to be in four color? Is it going to be in two color? Can we just make anything we want any color we want? And how should they price the book?
Tom and the team at Norton tell the Alexes they probably want the book to retail for around $30 a copy to keep it affordable. A lot of hardcover books are in that price range, and it would be in keeping with the show's ethos of explaining the economy to as broad a group of people as possible.
And given that price point, Tom explains that the design decisions they are making have real stakes because each choice has a particular cost that could ultimately affect the retail price.
We buy ink by the gallon. You know, we buy paper by the pallet. If you're going to add 16 more pages to the book, you're adding that much more paper to every single book. And if you're going to print thousands of copies, that can add up really quickly.
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Chapter 5: What innovative ideas are proposed for the Planet Money book?
But the bigger question that Tom and the Alexes have to answer is this. How do you translate the irreverent, playful, formally experimental tone of the podcast and distill that into the book? Tom asks the Alexes for ideas, and true to form, they start cranking out one zany pitch after another.
Goldmark suggests they could draw miniature figures in the corner of the pages so readers could flip through them and get a bonus little flip book. He also suggests we could do a page explaining the evolution of currency printed on the actual fabric on which U.S. dollars are printed.
Because money is not really paper. It's actually made out of like cotton. And I was like, could we ask the company that makes the fabric that money is printed on? Could we ask them for like one page each book?
That idea prompts a little lesson from Tom on how the printing process actually works.
Books are not printed page by page. They're actually printed in these large sheets that then get folded down into one page size sheet and then cut. So you have these things called signatures, which are 16 pages at once. So you would actually have to have 16 pages of actual U.S. currency paper. I mean, logistically, very challenging to achieve Alex Goldmark's vision.
Okay. So we table that idea.
Yeah.
Yeah. The next idea came from Alex Maiassi, the writer. You see, he'd been flirting with creatively using scratch and sniff technology since his days working on a book about food for Atlas Obscura. As for his idea for the Planet Money book?
I really wanted the cover of this book to smell like money. maybe a little bit on the nose. And at one point I saw an article about how an Indian newspaper had celebrated the mango season by making the cover of that day's newspaper smell like mangoes. And so I sent a link to that article to Tom and I was like, see, it's possible. Like we got to make the cover of this book smell like mango.
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Chapter 6: How do the team members decide on the physical design of the book?
I'll go talk to my people.
I mean, we took the idea really seriously.
We got samples shipped from overseas. Now, Tom himself is not the person to figure out how to make a book smell like money. That is not his wheelhouse. For that, he's got to call in a new member to the Planet Money book squad, an expert in international book manufacturing. And her name is Druskin. Julia Druskin.
Julia is like Q from James Bond. You go to her and you're like, I want to do this crazy thing. And she's like, okay, let me go work on it. And she knows every printer and she knows all of the tricks of the trade and she knows how to get books done on time and under budget and is just really, really smart.
And like she comes back three weeks later and she's like, okay, I've solved it, but it'll cost you.
Yes. I learned a lot about Scratch and Sniff.
This, of course, is Julia Druskin, the cue to Tom Mayer's James Bond. She's the director of trade production at Norton. She's been helping produce books there for almost 30 years. So the idea of using scratch and sniff in a book was not alien to Julia, but this was different.
It's usually like, you know, pickles or roses or, you know, food, but it was money. So I called a bunch of my suppliers and I said, can you do scratch and sniff with money scent? And I have a domestic printer who has done a lot of these. They do kids' books. And they kind of walked me through it, and they were like, there's this one guy, and he's like the smeller.
And he tells you if it smells like what you're intending.
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Chapter 7: What processes are involved in the actual printing of the book?
So Julia gets some samples from a supplier in China. But they just, honestly, they didn't smell right.
Yeah.
They didn't smell like dollars. And then we thought, maybe Chinese money smells different? Like, I don't know.
Turns out the smell of money is very specific, and you know it when you smell it. And what we were scratching and sniffing here was not it.
Okay, so scratch that idea. Do not sniff it. No matter, there are a couple of other pitches that do seem a bit more feasible. One idea was to create a series of postcards that you could actually rip out of the book and send to a friend.
These would highlight different kinds of public goods around the world, like the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, or the standardized atomic clocks in Colorado that make things like GPS possible. Another idea was to make a poster, modeled after like an OSHA-style poster you might see hanging in a workplace.
But instead of labor regulations, this one would list the laws of the office from a Planet Money episode by the same name. Tom and Julia look into what it would take to make all these ideas into a printable reality and how much each of them would cost.
Some of them weren't expensive. Some of them were like, well, that's going to add a quarter to the unit cost. And some of them were like, that's going to add a dollar to the unit cost. And that would have major downstream effects on what the actual cost to the customer would be. That could negatively impact how many people are going to buy the book. So you have to really weigh those things.
Tom eventually breaks the news to the Alex's about how much all these schticks in total might actually add to the production costs and the retail price. If they go ahead with all of them, he says, the book is going to have to retail for somewhere above $40. That meant Planet Money might lose a chunk of potential buyers.
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Chapter 8: What final steps are taken before the book is published?
That way, the designs for the postcards and the Laws of the Office poster could still live inside the book, even if they can't be ripped out and actually used. The team brings in a creative director from NPR, Mito Habe-Evans, to help find illustrators and come up with a visual language for the book. They decide to introduce each chapter with a movie poster-style illustration.
Like, for a chapter about the wisdom of the crowd and picking stocks, they make a surreal depiction of a cow as a fortune teller. They also come up with playful little graphics, like a cartoon ranking the winners and losers from the shift to remote work.
Now, in this first phase of the book production process, Tom says you can think of his role not only as a director, but also as a conductor, trying to keep all the trains moving at a steady clip.
Because even though there aren't super hard deadlines yet, remember, Norton has invested over a million dollars to buy the rights to the Planet Money book, so there is some urgency to get a return on that investment roughly within a couple years. And Tom says when deadlines are sort of loose like this, there is one force he has to contend with constantly.
The idea that work will expand to fill up whatever amount of time you assign to get it done. This idea actually has a name. It's one of the things we explain in that episode about the laws of the office. It's called Parkinson's Law.
Parkinson's Law is as ubiquitous in publishing as gravity is to Earth.
Ha ha ha.
Every book could eat all the time in the world because every book is a big, gigantic, bespoke intellectual project that you could spend years working on. Authors do spend years writing them, and the editor could spend many, many, many hours editing every word and making sure everything was as strong as possible.
And Alex Mayasi, who is writing the Planet Money book, says for a while he could really feel himself fighting Parkinson's Law. But at the beginning, at least, the law seemed to be winning.
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