CarlyBee’s Recent Comments

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  While switching to recycled paper is nice, to be honest, the real waste within the publishing industry is due to extremely antiquated business models, wherein they purposefully over-produce books, over-ship them, and then at the end of the first few months of sales, when the expected top-seller has made it way from the New Books table to to bargain table out front of Borders, the store then sends back all the unwanted copies (save a few which go into the fiction stacks) and gets a refund from the book publisher. Can you imagine this happening in any other industry?

  All of those books then get remaindered (their covers are torn off) and some get resold on black markets (though I've never actually seen a book with a fake cover, only read the warning about them in book flaps), but most just end up in warehouses. Even if they do get recycled... what of the carbon footprint their circular journey has taken? No wonder profits are dwindling.

  All of this serves as a bigger argument for more On-Demand publishing and the Kindle and other non-conventional ways of delivering those juicy (or vapid, depending on your taste) tales... and none of this really puts the blame on the author, only the medium their stories get sold as. The day will come when you can walk into a book-store and order a book off a screen and watch as a the machine prints you a single copy of that book, an actual bound BOOK book instantly. One printed on recycled paper, one that hasn't had to be schlepped in diesel trucks across the country, one that won't be remaindered, because you ordered exactly how many copies you needed... obviously this is still a ways out, but it's cool to know someone has been thinking of a way to fix the book business problem (and it's a big problem).
  

  On Ask Umbra on paperback writers posted 4 months, 3 weeks ago 10 Responses