Existing printers are at or near capacity

June 5, 2024 4:52 AM

"Colorado publishers have experienced double digit year-on-year rises in printing and delivery costs, with the sharpest increases in the past two years. This has been exacerbated by decreasing supply of printing options across Colorado. The state’s unique geography, with mountain passes closed over the winter, and distance from printers decrease the affordable options available to many publishers." A white paper on the future of printing from the Colorado Media Project. Previously.

"Rise in paper prices is major hit for Maltese publishing industry" [2024]
"Not-for-profit scholarly publishing might not be cheaper – And that’s OK" [2024]
"Global Book Publishing - Market Size, Industry Analysis, Trends and Forecasts (2024-2029)" [2023]
"Rising costs force more digital innovation" [2022]
"Pulp friction: Why paper has become a huge headache for publishers" [2022]
"Publishers’ paper costs cause concern" [2018]

Discussion of paper+print+mailing costs is common in my everyday life and professional circles. I assumed it had appeared on the blue before, but I couldn't find a post specifically about it. Happy to have someone add a better Previously in comments.

posted by cupcakeninja (12 comments total)

Great post! I had no idea about this but have noticed that ordinary paper and printing costs have crept up faster than I'd expected - I used to be able to get great prints for about $5 and now routinely pay $7-$10. I have also been sticker shocked by print magazines. I used to buy magazines for pure pleasure and then as gifts, but the cost is close to a paperback now for a single issue. Really nice paper is now almost a luxury art material instead of a consumable basic.

Interesting that a competitor for raw recycled materials is boxes (great long read on the rise of cardboard boxes.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 5:52 AM on June 5 [4 favorites]

Is any institution tracking or reporting on the changes in costs for digital print materials and UV/latex/solvent ink prices?
posted by tedious at 6:18 AM on June 5 [1 favorite]

I don’t know about the former, but there are some reports floating around about ink prices, I think. I leaned into the paper side of things here because that’s the thing I hear most commonly. I wonder (don’t know) if that’s due to greater source uniformity than with ink.
posted by cupcakeninja at 6:56 AM on June 5

I was just reading yesterday about the sharp increase in the price of newsprint over the past twenty-five years—around the start of the millennium it was around $40 a ton, and it spiked over $600 by 2017 (when I found a Tedium article about it).

Newspapers have really gotten squeezed on both ends—paper costs through the roof and display ads cratering haven’t left a lot of room for physical delivery, which is a shame because I still think the newspaper is the ideal e-reader.
posted by thecaddy at 7:06 AM on June 5 [5 favorites]

As the editor of a nonprofit magazine, rising paper costs has been a major headache, but not nearly so challenging as the rising cost of labor for everyone involved in making the publication. It costs me around $0.85/piece to print 14,000 48-page copies, but the total cost per piece is closer to $9. Magazines are more expensive at the newsstand because ad sales have collapsed, so readers must pay a larger portion of production costs.
posted by Just the one swan, actually at 8:43 AM on June 5 [2 favorites]

The newspaper in my city (population 200k) got bought by Gannett (USA Today) a few years ago. Now it's printed in another city a 2 hour drive away. The editor is in a third city a 3 hour drive away, who also edits that city's paper; a story running twice in a week or even in the same edition is a common occurrence. The newspaper here no longer has any office that I'm aware off, just a place to hand over papers to the carriers. There's never local news from the day prior.

A year ago my wife complained about papers piling up so I switched to the digital edition and found a process to make sure I look at it every day. The cost to me is about 1/3 of the paper edition. The e-edition includes Gannett sections on national/world news and sports news that are up-to-date like a traditional paper.
posted by neuron at 9:04 AM on June 5 [2 favorites]

I just remember like a decade ago I had a book go through an emergency print run because of a shortfall in copies. They went and printed those in the US to beat the delay in Chinese printed copies. In order to keep the pricing the same, they reduced the quality and man was it noticeable. The US copies are fainter and less rich appearing. The blacks are grays and the paper isn't as crisp/sturdy. The Chinese copies had rich blacks and a sheen to them, but were still cheaper.

That was a decade ago and I know it's only gotten worse.
posted by drewbage1847 at 10:02 AM on June 5 [3 favorites]

Is any institution tracking or reporting on the changes in costs for digital print materials and UV/latex/solvent ink prices?
"UV cost vs solvent cost" is a loaded question with way too many variables to answer. [reddit]
previously

I don’t know about the former
for institutions, there are a few (in the US, literally) printing museums, e.g.
https://museumofprinting.org/, https://printingmuseum.org/collections/, https://www.printmuseum.org/

more blues:
the problem began with paper, paper is thin and the lines of the images are softer than a fine art, wording telegrams, the advent of new printing techniques coincided with the rapid expansion of education, a fine press printing aesthetic to a mass market, radiant images, sustained, distraction-free, blissfully immutable, a sample book with beautiful posters, What Is the Business of Literature?, `, I just want to say that I cannot imagine reading House Of Leaves in an electronic version, most anarchist of anarchist book outfits, Have fun with old friend Karl as he explains how the exploitation and alienation of labour is the driving force of capitalism.
Our poster version of his seminal work cheekily reduces his whole philosophy to an ephemeral consumer product, nanometres; typography, letterpress and printing history. Enjoy. Just read the whole pdf and noticed this;
— For the most part, real economic value cannot be stored

trees are magnificent
posted by HearHere at 8:18 PM on June 5 [1 favorite]

also, A free "print-and-play" board game

posted by HearHere at 1:41 AM on June 6 [1 favorite]

Neuron, I'm extremely interested in your process for ensuring you read the digital edition every day.

My local paper usually gets delievered before I leave for my commute, so I'm defintiely interested in figuring out a better way of looking at this stuff.

(I wish the dream of "print on demand" newspapers had come to fruition; I'd love to have something scheduled to print right before I went downstairs for breakfast in the morning. But I would settle for apps that downloaded just that day's news and didn't need an internet connection after that.)
posted by thecaddy at 6:06 AM on June 6 [1 favorite]

That exists for hotels, so it’s a choice not to offer it more widely.

There are apps that deliver awkward screen based versions of daily papers (probably a PDF under the covers), but even then they’re constrained to the app or its website.
posted by snuffleupagus at 8:37 PM on June 6

Our poster version of his seminal work

Postertext was born out of the Reddit community in 2010 and was an early adopter in accepting Bitcoin as a payment method in 2014. The concept of using words to create illustrations quickly became an online sensation and was mentioned in The New York Times, Wired, GQ, Harvard, and many others. In 2016, the illustrations were collated and bound to create "Boundless Books: 50 Literary Classics Transformed into Works of Art"—a hardcover still available in major bookstores across the world. With long-form literature dwindling and mom-and-pop bookstores shuttering their windows, the artist stopped producing new works and ultimately shut down the operation in 2017.

In 2021, during the pandemic, Postertext was resurrected to contribute to the new era of digital art: non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Today, all artworks are purchasable only as NFTs.

So now it's Posertext.
posted by snuffleupagus at 4:53 AM on June 7 [1 favorite]