Miami Vices and Books

Book damage and who is at fault!

CHAPTER 16 Miami Vice 

I had a good time giving you my best guesses on the production schedule for the Bob Dylan book that I decided to do something with the most recent book I read. In fact, I’ve decided to suss out topics that present themselves in the books I read this year for your enjoyment. 

Next up! The Year of Dangerous Days Riots, Refugees, and Cocaine in Miami 1980. It’s a thrilling ride through the politics and crime, crime and politics of Miami at a crossroads, written with historical figures coming to life on every page from interviews, documents, and newspapers. My beloved Mother in Law lives in South Florida so it’s one of my favorite places on earth. Don’t get me started on South Florida! Jugos Tropicales? ¿Colada y pan? Plátanos Fritos? Arroz y Cameron? Sun, sand, the sea, and crazy lizards? Sign me up. 

The only thing that happened with the book that wasn’t excellent was the binding. Pages fell out from time to time and this reminded me of my number one pet peeve in book publishing and the topic for this installment of the Why and How Book Project: Amazon Book Reviews that have NOTHING to do with the book. 

Restaurant owners probably feel the same about Yelp reviews. The fact that they were out of eggs has nothing to do with how good a restaurant is at making an omelet. The same with pages falling out of a book. That has nothing, zip, zero, nada, zilch, to do with how good a book’s content is or the publisher. But I’ve seen it on Amazon, this complaint being the reason for a 1 Star Review. Let’s dive in and I’ll explain how the pages falling out are really not the publishers fault, let alone the author. 

First off. The Publisher does not print their own books. At least not in most cases. There are some University Presses and Religious Presses out there that do but for the most part the Publisher is like you when you go to hire a third party for a service. The author has no input on where a book prints unless there’s some weird situation but 99% of the time, no. Hard no. 

I see complaints like this. “Well, the publisher is employing shoddy vendors to make an extra buck off of me!!” There’s no scenario where this is true. There are a handful of major print vendors in the US and they more than likely printed every book you have in your home. At this level there is no cheap route to maintaining and operating the equipment. You either keep your machines running clean and efficiently or you fall behind and would soon be out of business. 

 At one time you could get significantly cheaper books made in China. This is before 2008 and definitely gone by 2016. This would be for Cookbooks, Art Books, Design Books, High End Bibles, things of that nature. In that scenario you still had to pay shipping, run the risk of not getting your books and the vendor disappearing on you overnight. This is besides any number of ethical considerations that could be compromising. These types of manufacturers rarely, if ever, make paperback or conventional hardcover books for the American market. It’s just not worth it for anyone involved from the cost of shipping to the ocean time delay. This is changing in some respects due to Domestic printers being over capacity but it’s rare. The odds of the paperback book you have being made in some China sweatshop are close to 0. 

A book might have been printed on a digital press if it was not printed at one of the major book manufacturers in the US. Digital Press books are actually more expensive per unit. A-lot more. The reason Publishers do this is because they can buy a-lot less of the book. You pay 2-3 times the unit cost to keep less dollar value inventory on hand. QC is easier in this scenario because there are much less books to look through when they come off the run. Sometimes they are a print job of 1 unit! So in this scenario, again, they are not making money off of you. 

Sure there are local presses in some towns. Maybe they aren’t as good as the Big Dog printers of the world but here’s the trick they also aren’t cheaper. In fact they are often almost double. They just don’t have the volume to support prices that are competitive with the bigger makers in the US. So again, saving a dime to screw the consumer isn’t an option by going with a smaller printer. 

I’ve seen the, “How could the publisher do this? Can we trust them with anything if they let something like this happen!!” Well, they can control what they can control. They certainly cannot afford to have someone QC check every book copy that comes off the line. They cannot afford to hand bind each book. They can’t afford to sew the binding of every book. To have a book be affordable and still be able to pay the bills and the staff, conventional perfect bound book making is the way to go. If you did succeed in getting a world where you could get the publisher to examine every book, then your book would cost even more money. Me? I’ll take the gamble on a book here and there with pages falling out so I can get a paperback under $20. 

Ok, well how does it happen? With pages falling out the book block was loaded a little weird or the glue that binds the book into the cover was getting a little low in the machine. Whoever was watching the machine had to go to the restroom or someone asked them a question and took them away for a moment and viola, the glue got low, the book didn’t bind as well. The good news is, almost every step in the process is also monitored by a computer. if a level gets off, it lets the team know and it stops the work. Even then, things still get through. In these cases it’s a handful every time. The printer makes an effort to collect every errant copy and throw it in the recycler but even then, sometimes a bad book makes it out the door. If you are reading a hardback or paperback, 1c interior book, in the US, 99% of the time the book that has a defect was made by the same printer that made all of the perfect books in your library. Think about it like this. If you made tens of millions of something every year, don’t you think you might miss a few loose pages? 

I think there is a misconception that among printers there is some sort of hierarchy like fast food to elevated to fine dining or from a KIA to a Toyota to a BMW. These tiers don’t really exist among the printers. They exist more between the formats. A saddle stitched book, where the page count is 88 or so pages or less are bound with two metal staples. That is the lowest form of binding. Paper called Groundwood paper, think of a newspaper, is the lowest form of paper. For example, if you went to Amazon and saw a book advertised as a masterfully bound, handsome version of your favorite book and ordered it and received it printed on ground wood and bound with staples, then by all means, give that a 1 Star review. 

Well, what is something I can complain about?! Bad typesetting and small print is something that you can blame on the publisher because it is their fault and yes they are trying to make a dime off of you. Ha ha. Well to be fair, the typesetting might be the only one they have of the book, it might be the only format of the content they have. Recreating the entire file is a costly and time consuming job involving editors and designers. However, If you ever feel like all the words are stuffed on a page with no room to breathe, that is bad  typesetting and it was done to save money. How? The less pages you use, the less per unit you pay. 

I hope this was fun to see behind the curtain a bit. If you have any weird book damage you’ve seen please let me know in the comments and I can tell you what's’ going on.