Will tariffs impact book printing?

It's the private equity, actually

Last week’s post on paper and paper mills was so popular I thought I’d follow it up with one on printing and printers.

First, some things to watch: with the news about tariffs, the potential resurgence of U.S. manufacturing, and the latest buzzy new release (Audition seems to be the appointed book of this season?) ringing in your ears, spend a few minutes watching this fabulous video about how a book is made. ¹ I would follow that by watching this very helpful video about how a POD (print on demand) book is made. Ignore that this video is Amazon-branded: watch for the even more detailed explanation of each step. And as you watch, note the humans involved in making books, and what their jobs entail.²

The printing industry has gone as has the paper one—as has the book distribution one, as has the publishing houses one—more and more consolidation and conglomeration. I mentioned last week that my favorite regional printer, McNaughton & Gunn, was bought in 2023. It was not alone. Edwards Brothers Malloy, one of the largest in the US, closed in 2018. RR Donnelly’s book printing division became part of LSC Communications in 2016; In 2020, LSC was bought by Atlas Holdings. Thomson-Shore went bankrupt in 2019 and was bought by Sheridan (who also bought McNaughton Gunn). (Doing this research I learned that Verso was taken over in 2022 by the German company BillerudKorsnäs. Atlas, buyer of LSC, tried to buy the company as well.³

I could go on. Longtime readers of this newsletter may remember my posts about printing during COVID, paper shortages that happened then, and how POD became suddenly better and more affordable than other options. It’s easy to forget that it was not COVID that created these issues: the issues pre-dated COVID, and are due to the issues above. But COVID exposed all the problems with conglomeration that COVID supply chain issues exacerbated.

How do these changes impact publishing? Well, of course, small presses get hit the hardest (when do they not?), because smaller print runs become less affordable (and make POD more appealing, something I (again) wish booksellers who are opposed to POD would understand). Costs across the board rise. And, of course, it makes overseas printing more appealing, because printing a book in China instead of the US can be as much as five times cheaper (but also much slower, as the books are put on a —you guessed it—slow boat from China). China has other complications, namely the Chinese government, which won’t allow some things to be printed. We tried to print our recent Pittsburgh in 50 Maps book there, but the censors objected to the borders on a global map included in the book. Instead of changing the borders, we printed the book domestically. Because of this, we also had to increase the price of the book.

Now, tariffs. Right now, it looks like books are exempted from the current tariff war, but everyone sends out “monitoring the situation, changes may occur” emails. What many in publishing are bracing for are the kinds of slowdowns we saw during COVID, as the diminished number of US printers may mean the longer turnaround time, paper shortages, and increased prices we saw during COVID. What I cannot imagine—as I cannot for the situation with paper and pulp—is the recently shuttered and consolidated domestic printing industry seeing a revival. Watch that video again. These machines are big. They are expensive. If a part breaks, it might take months for a new one to arrive. And can one retain the same romance of the “smell of paper” or “the irreplaceable experience of curling up with a hardcover” after you’ve see the bored looks on the faces of the factory workers in the first video?

If I was forced to give millions of dollars to the future of domestic printing, I’d give it someone who wants to expand POD capability. The two behemoth players in this game, Ingram and Amazon, could use competition, people are reading fewer books so print runs may continue to dwindle, and they require fewer machines, less capital, and fewer employees. But it would require publishers and consumers to consciously choose this option, and the higher prices they likely entail. ⁴

1. This video also shows the difference between offset and digital printing, and illustrates why digital printing is not the same as POD (print on demand), something the confuses many people.

2. When I was in academia I worked in the field of book history: then as now lots of professors (including me at some point) teach their students, or at least have on display, letterpress printing. It’s not clear to me, other than it’s more compact and easier to explain—and a strangely nostalgic sense that this work might have been fun—why this antiquated process should hold such sway (it was, for most of those who worked in printing in the 18th and 19th centuries, as much drudgery as it is appears in these videos to be today). Seems like taking students on tours of current printing facilities would be more educational.

3. Atlas “targets underperforming or discontinued operations from corporate sellers, bankruptcy purchases, out-of-court restructurings, and reorganizations”

4. At this point I should make clear that I don’t really know what I’m talking about. The gaps in my understanding of this industry are large, the research above quick and dirty. I hope there will be some better research and reported pieces on the domestic printing (and paper) industries!