“I’ve been doing this for 25 years and I’ve never seen a market like this before.”
— Bill Rojack, Vice President of Midland Paper via the webinar “The Powerful Case for U.S. Book Manufacturing in the Face of Global Supply Chain Challenges, Paper Shortages, and Rising Distribution Costs”
From toilet paper to meat, steel to lumber; supply chain disruptions have been felt in unprecedented ways throughout the 2020’s. Book paper has not been immune to this. The disruptions, like in other industries, are due to an amalgam of reasons accelerated by the 2020 pandemic, including labor shortages and business closures.
In the case of book printing, the seeds of its supply chain corrosion were planted years before 2020. With book paper only accounting for 5-7% of the paper market, mills started to shift priorities toward other paper goods that nourish their bottom line; massively produced print paraphernalia such as pamphlets and packaging material.
Then, perhaps unsurprisingly amidst 2020’s global lockdown, book sales boomed. Book printers scrambled to meet the demand of publishers rushing in new print jobs to ride the wave of inside rumination. The paper industry was unprepared, global lockdowns exacerbated things, and the issue of paper shortages have been compounding ever since.
There are two primary methods of mass-market book printing; offset and digital. Offset is a classic method reserved for the “large-run” print job. The setup process of an offset job is the most expensive part of the process; this video succinctly explains why. As most of the cost of an offset job is in its setup process, it incentivizes volume, providing a cheaper price per unit the more you print. Most offset printers won’t accept a job for anything fewer than a thousand units.
Digital laser or inkjet printing kicked off in the 1980’s ahead of the dot-com era. As there is no physical setup beyond plugging in your machine and loading it up with toner, digital printing became supremely popular for short-run orders and self-publishing. Digital short-run produces a more expensive price per unit and there are no price breaks for volume due to the licensing model behind digital printing. In short, you purchase a commercial-grade printer from HP or Xerox. In that purchase, you also purchase a license from the printer vendor that enables the “cost-per-click” in running a digital press—a fee per sheet. This license covers on-call maintenance, as well as restocks on toner. So, you know, they keep you going. But this is why digital printing is generally unsustainable for larger volume runs, but suitable for small batch printing, or print-on-demand.
Because digital printing requires no laborious setup process, it produces a much swifter turnaround time compared to offset. A large-run offset job typically takes a minimum of three months for your books to ship from the printer, although now lead-times have become increasingly unpredictable in the wake of paper disruptions and overwhelming backlogs. This has resulted in certain leading commercial offset printers to require more than half a year to ship jobs, prompting many publishers to resort to digital and print-on-demand to fill in the gaps.
Enter Ingram Industries
“Remember… with Ingram, the bookseller comes first.”
— Ingram Book Co. slogan circa 1970
The Ingram family has a generational and diverse history of entrepreneurship in the United States. Prior to E. Bronson Ingram II founding the Ingram Book Company in 1970, his father Orrin Henry Ingram established successful businesses across lumber, oil refinement, and a network of inland distribution barges throughout the midwest. When Orrin Henry passed away in 1963, he left his two sons Bronson and Frederic the Ingram Oil & Refining Company, which they rebranded to the Ingram Corporation.
In 1964, the Ingrams purchased the Tennessee Book Company, a textbook depository for the Tenenssee public schooling system. Simultaneous to Ingram’s expansion to books, they acquired the Tennessee Insurance Company to help curb costs of insuring their growing liabilities in physical assets across water and land. It turns out, acquiring an insurance company and selling themselves insurance was cheaper than purchasing policies from a third party.
The Ingrams continued to scale their business, diversifying into petroleum, chemicals, and the distribution of these related products using their inherited inland barge network. Despite their focus in energy industries, the books division displayed unexpected and rapid growth toward the end of the 1960’s, prompting the rebranding of the Tennessee Book Company to the Ingram Book Company in 1970.
From the 1970’s onward, the Ingram Book Company rolled out a series of industry-shifting programs; wildly competitive wholesale discounts for booksellers and unprecedented fulfillment speed in servicing the book trade on a national level, accelerated by warehouse acquisitions across the country. By 1980 the Ingram Book Company was the dominating wholesaler of books in the United States, a position they hold to this day.
To emphasize the Ingram Corporation’s versatile and still-growing portfolio, E. Bronson Ingram II reorganized the corporate structure and rebranded the parent organization as Ingram Industries. In 1981, the Ingram Book Company made its first move in diversifying beyond the wholesaling of books with the purchase of the John Yokley Company, its first commercial printer. We are still talking about digital print-on-demand, after all.
In 1989 Ingram Industries acquired Micro D, which at the time was specialized in the distribution of personal computers; Micro D would become Ingram Micro, and Ingram Micro would go on to obtain a one-third market share in the distribution of information technology products and services.
E. Bronson Ingram II passed away in 1995 at the age of 63, and his two sons John and Orrin Ingram II became co-presidents of Ingram Industries. In 1997 under the direction of John Ingram, Lightning Print was developed to “print as few as one book at a time” to be a solution against the volume requirements of offset printing. By the end of 1998, Lightning Print had 1,500 books in its library. Today, what is now Lightning Source receives 4,000 book uploads a day with a global print grid consisting of Ingram-owned printers across the US, UK, Europe, and Australia in addition to partnerships with regional printers in over twelve other countries covering six continents. No print fulfillment in Antarctica… yet.
“Why in the world are we wallpapering the warehouse with books? Wouldn’t it be better to store a digital file and print a book when there was demand?”
— John Ingram
Ingram Industries now holds two subsidiaries that control their book interests, the Ingram Content Group and Ingram Publisher Services. This next part is remarkable to us in a contemporary context: in 2016, Ingram acquired Publishers Group West, Consortium Book Sales & Distribution, Perseus Distribution Services, Legato, and Perseus’ digital asset management service Constellation. In a flourish, Ingram consolidated a significant portion of the “independent” book distribution field outside of the Big Four arena.
Today with John Ingram chairing the board of Ingram Industries, Ingram remains secure in its position as the defacto books wholesaler throughout the North American continent, with booksellers small and large primarily using ipage, Ingram’s wholesale ordering tool, as their only method of acquiring inventory. Emerging e-commerce platforms such as Bookshop.org exclusively fill their orders via Ingram. With Ingram’s network of digital printers, print-on-demand infrastructure, and international distributors they are perfectly positioned to pick up the pieces of a crumbling supply chain.
What you see today was his tomorrow, yesterday
Chapter House was founded upon the merging of imprints Black Ocean and Not a Cult, in partnership between myself and publisher Janaka Stucky. I met Janaka at the Portland AWP conference in 2018. We aligned over our zest for publishing; our catalogs sharing similar themes and aesthetics, our readership supporting us both directly with sales from our websites, our annual submission competitions robust and vital to the lifeblood of our frontlists.
Our initial vision was to found a new imprint in speculative fiction, what would become Psychonaut Press. We found that combining our backlists and our future frontlist output under a singular group, Chapter House, would likely get the attention of distributors across the book trade. Black Ocean was coming from Small Press Distributors, Not a Cult from Southern California Book Distributors – final vanguards in independently owned book distribution.
Our combination and future prospects gave us the opportunity to speak with a number of Big Four and Ingram-owned distributors. We ultimately went with Consortium; their pre-Ingram sterling reputation of supporting independent press, along with their contemporary catalog of publishers convinced us it was the right move. Signing to Consortium, now an Ingram-owned company, also unlocked for Chapter House a suite of tools from Ingram Publisher Services, including seamless print-on-demand enablement via Ingram’s fleet of global digital printers to fulfill our trade accounts.
This gives us a competitive edge that assures three things:
Our titles will never go out of print, archived eternally in the print cloud for as long as infrastructure stands to keep Ingram’s cloud afloat. We no longer have to worry about demand to keep a title accessible.
If a title’s inventory runs out we can seamlessly swap to a digitally printed version of a title while awaiting its long-run printing from an offset printer, keeping the supply chain flowing.
Our titles can distribute globally with regionalized discounts. In regions where Ingram Publisher Services has no warehouse storage, the title can simply print and distribute to local booksellers, mitigating lofty freight operations.
This is unprecedented agility and supply chain assurance that is a must in the digital age for our relatively young, growing business. As I’ve expressed in my writing about self-publishing, Ingram extends very similar services to individual authors, albeit without the human sales force of a world trade distribution partnership.
It seems, with almost certainty, that book printing will continue to trend in the direction of digital print and print-on-demand. Offset will become increasingly difficult to wrangle for smaller publishers, particularly under the stress of paper shortages dramatically increasing turnaround times on larger runs. Big Four companies appear somewhat resilient to this issue with their in-house offset and digital print operations neatly integrated under their multifaceted conglomerates.
What does this mean? Is it a good or a bad thing? Like all big change, it’s perhaps a bit of both. It is fair to be wary of mass consolidation of industry. With offset, you get a delicious variety of paper, binding, foiling, and other lovely customization options. Print-on-demand, and most digital print operations, are quite on-rails with standardized trim, stock, and binding options. The automation of print-on-demand also carries with it a variety of quality assurance issues with no human touch to assure your printing is precise, your paper trimmed cleanly, and — in some hilarious edge cases — the correct book is even printed.
At the end of the day, what I care about is the empowerment of the individual or small team to compete at the same — or higher — level as big, entrenched, century-plus-old institutions. This is the edge the digital age has offered us in the face of so much infrastructure already having been bought, consolidated, and standardized. Agility over conglomerate bloat. Fluidity over corporate bureaucracy. David with a sling over Goliath’s monolithic power.