Hello my fellow eco-publishers… and apparently, there are a lot of us running around. Turning off lights, changing bulbs, using both sides of our copy paper, using recycled paper, using eproofs and egalleys, even down to recycled material for the lunchroom… eliminating bottled water, ‘teams’ of green employees researching how to be more green, recycling cell phones… My head is spinning.
Is it just me? It has to be. I must not ‘get it’.
Why don’t publishers just decide to only sell non return?
Instead of printing 50,000 books, 45,000 of which wind up in bargain bins and fireplaces of warehouse employees… why not just print, ok, be generous, 10,000 books… and, hold on for this one… if you see the title is selling, reprint it! Just like bestsellers do. Feel funny about having four printings to get to 40,000 in print?
Or is it just easier to keep doing what you have always done, and overprint by 200-300%? Sure faster than having to watch inventories, track sales weekly, and laborious and boring things like that… and oddly, once everyone gets on this bandwagon, all truly ’selling’ outlets will order 10% more, and those who aren’t as likely, will order 50% less… and instead of having 45,000 very un-green remainders floating around… you might have 4,000.
How about a 90% reduction in the “tree waste” we are creating as publishers?
(Sorry to upset all these industry committees and initiatives and programs and task forces who are looking at everything from dirty floors to bottled water to pens that leak…) Just print less books! Print what you need, and use what you print. (Same rules I had when I was a kid at my family’s dinner table… take what you eat, eat what you take.)
I have been advocating, and practicing, my GREEN position for thirty years now… twenty years a futurist you know… always out in front of the curve.
I guess I just don’t ‘get it’.
Be well.
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