Analysis | The good news is we’re reading more books — the bad is that supply chain issues are making them harder to get

Here’s a hot tip: if you want to gift someone a book over the holidays, order it now. Better still, head to a bookstore and pick one up.

Those supply chain issues that have been dogging every other industry are having an impact on getting books from the pens of authors to the stores and into the eager hands of hungry-to-read customers.

There’s good news and bad news in that.

The good news is that demand for books is back after a slowdown at the very beginning of the pandemic. According to BookNet Canada, “Print sales for the first six months of 2021 vs. the first six months of 2020 show a significant increase of approximately 1.5 million units (to 22,502,564) and $47 million (to $463,780,134) year-over-year.”

The bad news is the industry is caught in the middle of what some describe as a “perfect storm” of challenges. With increased demand for books, a decrease in paper available to print them on and those pesky supply chain issues, everyone from printers to booksellers to publishers has been scrambling.

“This is not the first supply chain issue the book industry has faced,” says Robert Wheaton, chief strategy and operations officer at Penguin Random House Canada. “Capacity issues at the printers have been an issue for several years, largely driven by a surging demand in print books, and now add in COVID-related, non-book-specific supply chain issues and you have an even more complex situation.

“But underlying all of this is a positive story for the book industry and that is that a lot of people are reading books and have rediscovered their passion for reading, some even more so over the past 18 months,” he said.

David Caron, co-publisher at the small, independent ECW Press, puts it like this: there are challenges in three separate parts of the sector; the printing side, the warehouse side and the retail side.

“I’ve heard it described as a perfect storm,” he said.

Byron Loeppky is the senior VP of books at Winnipeg printer Friesens, the largest printer of hardcover books in Canada. The company’s been in business since 1907, so it’s seen cycles and downturns come and go. Then there are fewer print companies, too. A long decline in demand for print led to a period of consolidating and competitors going out of business, Loeppky said. What he’s seeing now is extremely tight print capacity.

Since coming out of COVID-19, Loeppky said, sales have grown. “Since the beginning of June last year, as much (print) capacity as we can find we can sell,” he said. “Historically, customers could expect lead times of four or five weeks for a new title (two to three weeks for a reprint).”

This year, though, “we’re booking out into February or March of next year already, and we even have customers booking slots for us already in 2023. This is something we’ve never seen before.”

Trying to get paper is getting increasingly tricky, too. Some paper mills have shut down shifts and equipment, said Loeppky. And, as Caron points out, “so many mills have switched their production facilities into doing … toilet paper or paper towels, or cardboard for those Amazon packages.”

The knock-on effect is that Loeppky has seen a 10 to 15 per cent increase in the price of paper.

Another thing that isn’t so obvious but is key to producing a book is glue. The big storm in Texas in September had an impact on refineries that produce the resin used in the production of glue to bind the books. The price increase there was 80 to 90 per cent.

So that “slightly less” book manufacturing capacity at a time when demand has increased — last year, Loeppky said, there was double digit growth — “it’s the perfect storm.”

There’s that phrase again.

Caron notes that gauging demand for a book is a bit of an art. Publishers have to figure out how many books of any one title to print.

Even when the books are finally printed and sitting on a pallet ready to go, delays in overseas shipping and ground transportation within North America (exacerbated by a shortage of truck drivers) have added to the disruption.

As Kate Edwards, executive director of the Association of Canadian Publishers, points out, if the books have been ordered, “these books are going to arrive eventually. It’s just whether they’ll be able to be sold through in the best possible way.”

For Ben McNally, the owner of independent Toronto shop Ben McNally Books, his concern is getting the popular books in sufficient quantities and on time.

“We’re spending a little bit more time chasing after inefficiencies, like ‘Where is this order that we have this invoice for, but we don’t have the books?’” he said.

“I’m hearing stories that people are worried about having boxes, they’re worried about having packing tape, they’re worried about having enough people working in the warehouse,” McNally added. When ordering from certain distributors, he’s been warned not to expect their regular turnaround time.

Even the big publishers aren’t able to solve the supply chain issues.

“If we can’t solve all the COVID-related supply chain issues then we’ll focus and double down on the areas where we can support our retailers,” said Wheaton. “This means helping booksellers resupply faster so they don’t have the burden of carrying huge amounts of stock, and making investments in our supply chain so we can dramatically reduce transportation time.”

One of the points of added values for an indie bookstore like McNally’s is that they know their customers — often personally — and pick books they think they will buy. Sometimes they’re quirky or unusual books. And they’ll send out lists or give talks about the books they’re really excited about. Some books, McNally said, are selling out on publication day and can’t be reordered. Others that he likes he might not recommend if he’s not sure he can get them.

Which brings us to another problem.

Not all books are going to be year-round blockbusters. Publishers gauge the number of books to print based on research and market conditions. Some books might only have a limited marketing cycle. Some might do better than expected. Once a few reviews come out, or some word-of-mouth hype, or the author makes a few appearances and the publicity department gets to work, a book might fall off readers’ radar before it’s had a chance to get into as many hands as initially wanted it.

But there are things you can’t plan for.

“On the one hand, we have the season’s anticipated books like Miriam Toews’ ‘Fight Night’ we can prepare for, but then there is the phenomenon around #Booktok, which is driving a ton of online word-of-mouth dynamics that can happen really fast,” said Wheaton. “This can drive new sales for a book that we might have published five years ago or help catapult a new book to huge popularity out of the gate like ‘Iron Widow’ by Canadian author Xiran Jay Zhao, which debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times YA bestseller list.”

And with reprint times pushed from two weeks to six, they might miss the window for sales.

All of these challenges cause problems for booksellers, said McNally. And all of these challenges eat into profits, which ultimately will lead to higher prices for books.

Over five years there’s a 70 per cent increase in the cost of printing a book, said Caron. And that’s only part of the price. Each step along the way creates a cost: a percentage goes to the bookseller, to the distributor, to freight charges, to the warehouse for distributing the book, to the author.

“You have to find that fine balance between giving it everything you’ve got, but also trying to keep the cost within a place where you can actually sell the book at a price that’s not too exorbitant that people can pay,” said Caron.

The upshot: the book industry is still alive and kicking. And if you want to give a specific book as a gift during the holiday season, get it now, while you can.