View From the Publishing Trenches

Lots of publishers tout how “green” they are. Many eagerly sign up with the Green Press Initiative. Those solutions, however, address only the production aspects of publishing’s environmental impact.

Yet others are pumping out even more printed books on environmental subjects, as discussed in a recent New York Times article, “As Environmentalism Grows, Online Publishers Go Green.” Sure, let’s see how many more books we can dump into the marketplace all in the name of Holy Environmentalism.

You want to know what I believe is the real major environmental impact of book publishing? Even if you don’t, I’m going to tell you.

Book returns.

Most publishers who use offset printing to produce large print runs of books average 20-40% returns from bookstores and other retailers. Why? Because stacks of books are supposed to lure people into buying books. The shelf life of the average book in a typical chain bookstores is four months. Then they may find their way to the bargain table. Any not sold quickly there end up being boxed up and shipped back to the publisher for full credit.

If the publisher can unload them to remainder companies, those returns will be shipped out again to the remainder company’s warehouse. However, most will just be pulped.

That means that 20% or more of large-print-run books are shipped two or three times across the country only to end up being destroyed and maybe recycled.

Robert Miller was recently hired by HarperCollins to establish a new imprint and, as noted by Bloomberg.com in an article titled As Books Fill Dumps, Publishers Target Return Policy:

Miller, who’s vowed to revolutionize publishing in his new post, instantly targeted a surreal policy that’s been sacrosanct for too long: the practice that allows booksellers to send unsold copies back to publishers for credit.

What’s amazing is that one of the major US publishers has finally recognized this as a problem in need of solving. Many small and independent publishers have been railing against this problem for years. The reaction from most of the independent publishing community has been to advise us to just learn to live with the status quo.

Many of us, however, have not. Many of us, instead, have established terms that include not accepting returns for any books other than those damaged in transit, and then only for replacement copies. More and more are turning to the ultimate “green” initiative in publishing — print on demand. (I’m not talking about all those subsidy presses that euphemistically label themselves “POD publishers.”)

At Slipdown Mountain Publications LLC, we print almost all of our books using a print-on-demand printer (Lightning Source Inc.) and carry very little in-house inventory. When a customer wants a book directly from us, we ship from our intentionally limited inventory. If a retailer wants books for their inventory and orders from us, we order them from our POD printer who drop ships them to the retailer. And those books are not returnable, so the retailer must use care to order only what they are certain to sell.

Other retailers, including Amazon.com, order our books through LSI’s sister company, and the country’s largest wholesaler, Ingram Books. Those are also nonreturnable.

Of course, most brick-and-mortar retailers won’t keep our books in stock (because they can’t be returned for credit) but they will order copies for customers who ask. And libraries regularly order our books for their shelves.

So, publishers like Slipdown Mountain are, in reality, far more green than all those publishers who continue in the established path of ship-shelve-ship-destroy but who sign up for the Green Press Initiative, vowing to use only recycled paper — probably made from those books that had to be shipped repeatedly cross-country before being pulped.

Green, after all, comes in many shades. Some are just more impressive.

So, what’s your opinion on green publishing?