Have you ever wondered what happens to unsold bookstore stock? At best, books that don’t sell are shipped back to their warehouses, marked down, and sold by discount booksellers. At worst, their covers are ripped off and the pages are ground up, mixed with chemicals, and repurposed. Publishing operates on a consignment model, meaning that books sold to bookstores are only soft sales. The bookstore puts the book out for sale, and around six months later, it will begin returning whatever stock doesn’t sell to the publisher for a full refund. A book is only considered truly sold if it is purchased by a library or by an end consumer (Warner). This practice began during the Great Depression, when publishers were looking for ways to encourage bookstores to buy more books and take chances on unknown authors (Neary). The consignment model has persisted since then, and despite the inefficiency and waste it creates, it is seen as an unfortunate evil that must be tolerated.

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Publishers have been recycling books for even longer than they have been consigning them. In the early seventeenth century, the cost of paper was so high that the earliest publishers would rip pages from old books and use them as the end leaves in new ones. The process of book pulping as we know it did not appear until WWI, when the U.S. government needed raw materials and implemented the Waste Reclamation Service. It remains true both then and now that pulping plants aren’t always equipped to recycle every part of the book—glue, binding, and covers can get in the way, making it difficult to return the whole book back to liquid (Shaer). In these cases, the book’s final resting place may be a landfill. Although being pulped is a more sustainable fate than ending up in a landfill, the process isn’t perfect— it involves power generated from coal, natural gas, and other fossil fuel sources, and chemicals such as bleach are used to clean and process the paper (Padin). 

The call to end this cycle of overproducing books and destroying the excess is not new. Evidence of this can be found in an interview NPR conducted in 2008 with several publishing professionals about what the industry should do with unsold books. According to Avin Domnitz, who was the CEO of the American Booksellers Association at the time, the books that didn’t sell would often be returned and eventually reordered in an endless cycle of shipping in and out again. The interview goes on to examine a warehouse operated by the National Book Network, a distribution company located in Pennsylvania. Jed Lyons, who was then the chief operating officer of the distributor, said about 25 percent of what they shipped out came back as a return.

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According to Lyons, publishers clung to this system because its removal would hurt sales. Bookstores would be more careful about what they buy and would demand an even more discounted price to mitigate the risk of purchasing nonreturnable books. Despite calls from readers, authors, and publishing professionals alike to find a solution to this inefficient and wasteful system, the status quo has remained unchanged since the NPR article was written. Print runs are still unnecessarily high to keep costs down, distribution warehouses are still filling up with millions of books that no one knows what to do with, and publishing is still needlessly contributing to landfills. 

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The COVID-19 pandemic may indirectly become what finally forces publishers to change how they approach print runs. The pandemic has become a catalyst for structural changes to how books are printed and distributed. During the pandemic, the demand for books unexpectedly rose while the availability of labor within warehouses, print shops, and paper plants fell. As a result, printers—which had already been steadily closing or converting their equipment to produce packaging rather than paper for years—are running dry on their paper reserves with no ability to replenish them (“Examining Paper Shortages and Publishing Worker Unrest”). 

These changes are converging to create a printing industry that is in many cases not accepting new jobs for the rest of 2022. Now, securing paper—something that typically became an afterthought amongst a publisher’s many acquisitions, editorial, marketing, and design tasks—is at the forefront of the industry’s mind as it becomes more and more difficult to get books printed on time. There are no simple solutions to this complex issue that spans several industries. Rather than communication with the printer being one of the latter steps in a book’s journey, it may have to become one of the first. These supply chain issues call for publishers to involve printers in their early production meetings, ask what paper weights and trim sizes are available, and in some cases match the look and feel of the book to what the printer can do (“Looking for Answers to Paper Shortages”). 

These supply chain issues and paper shortages taken with publishing’s persisting overproduction problems come together to create an industry desperately in need of change. One solution may lie in print-on-demand, or POD. Historically, publishers have attempted to calculate how many copies of a book consumers will demand based on factors such as how many of an author’s previous books have sold. With POD, publishers will have copies of a book printed as they’re needed at a fixed price. This is costlier per unit, but publishers may find that readers are willing to pay extra if it means reducing the industry’s environmental impact. Switching to POD would create fewer incentives for publishers and bookstores to continue publishing’s historical model of consignment and returns, instead encouraging bookstores to stock only what is needed. Whatever the solution, it’s clear the industry needs a compromise. We are running out of paper to waste, and it is more pressing than ever to find ways to make every sheet count.