Our BOOK vs. the global supply chain
3/26/202647 min
When you come across a book at a yard sale or a bookstore, you might pay more attention to the words between the covers than the physical form of the book itself. But content and the form are both crucial to a book’s success. Each book you pull off the shelf, is the product of thousands of decisions, big and small, tying together vast supply chains and armies of workers from around the world.
On today’s episode, the second episode in our series: Planet Money sets out to actually write, design, and manufacture a book. We go spelunking deep inside the bowels of the publishing industrial complex. There will be trade wars, sunken cargo containers filled with lost cookbooks, deforestation regulations, and just a whiff of scratch and sniff.
Related:
- Episode 1: Inside a BOOK auction
- The laws of the office revisited
- Series: Planet Money makes a book
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This episode was produced by Willa Rubin. It was edited by Jess Jiang, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, and engineered by Robert Rodriguez. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.
Music: NPR Source Audio - “Motivation Or Mayhem,” “Missing A Deadline,” and “No Limits After All.”
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsAlexi Horowitz-Ghazi· Host0:01
This is Planet Money from NPR. I don't know about you, but every time I pick up a book in a bookstore or at a yard sale, the things I'm mostly paying attention to are the words, you know, the title, the author's name, the actual reading material, way more than the physical package they come in. But I had an experience recently that changed all that. You see, last year my boss's boss here on the show, my grand boss, he asked if anyone wanted to report out the story behind the making of the Planet Money book to see what it might reveal about the global economic machinery behind every book. I accepted that mission, which is how earlier this year I found myself spelunking deep inside the publishing industrial complex. I got an invitation to see one of the biggest bookmaking factories in the world, part of the Lakeside Book Company. And stepping into this place felt like stepping into Willy Wonka's factory, but for books. And while I didn't find any bookish Oompa-Loompas, I did meet a guy named Chris Moodie, ironically extremely chipper. Chris basically grew up at the plant.
Chris Moodie· Soundbite1:12
I started off in college to be a high school art teacher and then took a gap year, and that gap year has now been almost 39 years with the company.
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi· Host1:19
I'd come to Chris to help answer this sort of deceptively simple question: Where do books come from? Like, in a material, physical way, what path do they take