Our BOOK vs. the global supply chain
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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.
The wizard of publishing? The wizard of printing?
Printing, yeah.
The first thing that hits you in here is a sheer sense of scale. What are we looking at? This plant, Chris tells me, is a million square feet. They're constantly cranking out books, 24 hours a day.
On an average day, we make about 600,000 books a day.
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. There will be trade wars, sunken cargo containers filled with lost cookbooks, deforestation regulations, and just a whiff of scratch and sniff.
Three years ago, book editor Tom Mayer from the publishing house W.W. Norton made a proposal to my grandboss, Planet Money's executive producer Alex Goldmark, that Alex just could not refuse.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What insights about book production are revealed in this episode?
0:01–2:10
2
How does the team navigate the complexities of book manufacturing?
2:10–5:06
3
What challenges arise in choosing a printing location for the book?
5:06–7:23
4
How do tariffs and trade regulations impact book production?
7:23–9:13
5
What innovative ideas are proposed for the Planet Money book?
9:13–11:05
6
How do the team members decide on the physical design of the book?
11:05–13:00
7
What processes are involved in the actual printing of the book?
13:00–15:05
8
What final steps are taken before the book is published?
15:05–46:20