The Book Manufacturers Institute’s annual state of the industry report sees book manufacturing returning to a more normal business pattern in 2024 after four turbulent pandemic years, albeit with some caveats. The biggest question for 2024 is how the industry will react as publishers finally shed their excess inventory and printers use up the last of the large amounts of paper they bought to meet the demands of what turned out to be the over-publishing of books of the last couple of years.
Other factors to watch in the book manufacturing space include the rate of adoption of digital printing by publishers, the renewed threat of more offshoring of printing by publishers, and the ongoing challenge of attracting and retaining employees, the report found.
The report, written by NAPCO Research, stressed the importance of new technological developments that will make printing more efficient in the years ahead. “Digital printing technology, and inkjet in particular, continues to gain adoption in the book segment, being used alongside offset printing as a way to cost-effectively produce shorter runs of books,” the report found. “Given the excess inventory problems the industry faced in recent years, digital printing provides an option for printing books in the quantities needed, at the time they are needed. This technology can also help book manufacturers print and distribute closer geographically to their customers and avoid potential shipping delays of large volumes of offset printed books coming from overseas.”
The report quotes Midland Paper’s Bill Rojack as seeing signs of a return to more normal business. “As I look at each [publishing] segment, there’s a lot of hope that we’re going to rebalance and come back to some sort of normal in 2024,” Rojack said. “Activity definitely picked up in Q4 2023. I’d say activity is still better now than it has been, certainly in year-over-year comparison. Typically, Q1 in the trade space is quiet and I see that activity is actually better now than it usually is.”
However, Ashley Gordon, publishing market development manager for HP, said that publisher behavior is shifting, and she told the report authors that manufacturers will likely have to get used to sharing their customers with the competition. Given the uncertainties of the supply chain, Gordon predicted that publishers will want to print books close to the specific geographies where they expect to distribute those books, a strategy that she believes presents opportunities for domestic printers, “including smaller printers that can now compete for business with larger publishers that previously would have only worked with large print service providers." She qualified this prediction by saying that "printers gaining new business due to their ability to quickly produce and deliver short runs should not take any influx of work for granted.” She also warned that “while opportunity has emerged for printers to insource new business, it is also likely that they may lose some work as publishers diversify their geographic production positions.”
The report also recommends that the printing industry keep up with environmental and sustainability efforts both in Europe—where standards are higher than in North America—and in states like California and New York, which tend to be at the forefront of environmental legislation and regulations. Printers, the report notes, should work to shed the impression that book manufacturing is a dirty business if it wants to stay relevant in the future.
