Green book publishing

We went to a panel this evening on the greening of the book business. The panelists were almost entirely book manufacturers, the audience members all worked for publishers, and the actual theme of the first hour felt more like greenwashing, or perhaps a group therapy session.

The panel discussed a lot of ways that book manufacturing can be made less environmentally damaging. It’s useful to hear that major changes can happen in paper choices at a book manufacturer because of a few customers or even just one customer pushing for recycled papers. I’m glad to know that the offset work I order runs on sheet-fed presses where the inks may be 25% VOC and only 5% of that escapes into the atmosphere, rather than web-fed presses where the inks may be 40% VOC and 80% of that escapes into the atmosphere. But it makes me feel bad about occasionally buying a daily newspaper, since those do run on web-fed presses.

The shift away from hot lead typesetting and chemical films, the advent of soft proofing, smarter paper inventory management, lower-VOC inks, HID lighting, recycled paper, FSC-certified paper, alkaline paper production, soy-based inks, these are all important environmental steps that have been done first and foremost for cost reasons. (As one panelist helpfully explained, if they lower their costs, they can also lower their prices. And apparently customers choose based on price.) What the book manufacturers have figured out is that they can promote the environmental benefits as a way to make their customers and themselves feel good. They can even offer to let customers pay extra for the book manufacturer to buy carbon offsets or directed power generation. And for customers who aren’t willing to spec a recycled paper, they can offer a growing range of mostly meaningless certifications on virgin papers.

I knew who the panelists would be, and I shouldn’t have expected more. Book manufacturers who specialize in long runs are not going to tell you that the real environmental benefits in book publishing come from printing fewer books or shifting to electronic publication. The Xerox rep isn’t going to suggest a paperless workflow, the Adobe rep isn’t going to tell you to find a software solution that runs on your current hardware and stick with it, Barnes and Noble isn’t going to tell you to fix bookstore and distributor return policies. And the planet isn’t going to suggest anything as a solution, because the planet can’t join a panel at a conference table in the publisher’s 5th floor cafeteria.