This week we were trolled by a guy on the internet who informed us that he was a printer and that there was no paper shortage. We were just making it up.
Deep breaths.
A few years ago, John and I toured one of the several printing plants that we use. It took two days to see everything, and the most enormous part of the tour was the paper storage and recycling facility.
A fancy sheet-fed printing press is about the size of a city bus. The paper needed to feed that press can fill a city block and be three or four stories high. At our Tennessee plant, the paper comes in on train tracks through the building. I made a short film above that shows some of the paper storage – there was no way to get it all in one shot.
That storage building is now empty and stays empty. As soon as paper arrives, it is gobbled up by the presses. Small publishers, such as us, have little say in what sort of paper gets used in a book right now. If you don’t like the paper on hand, you can go to the end of the line and try again.
This week, we were told that the plant acquired some paper for “The Stick Chair Book.” Here was our choice: We could use paper that was a little cheaper than what we ordered. Or we could use a premium uncoated paper that was considerably more expensive than what we originally asked for.
We took the more expensive paper. But we have decided to keep the book’s retail price at $49. I just can’t see people paying more than $50 for a book on making vernacular chairs.
If things stay on track, the physical, chewed-up-tree version of “The Stick Chair Book” will be out in late October.
In the meantime, we will continue to offer “The Stick Chair Book Early Adopter Digital Package” until the hardbound book is released. For $25 you get a pdf of the book, plus pdfs of all the full size-patterns to make the five chairs in the book. And sheets and sheets of supplemental CAD drawings of the chairs.
When the book is released, this digital package will go away forever.
— Christopher Schwarz
If you make things up to release more ‘early adopter books’ I am not complaining.
Don’t be a jackass. If the paper costs more, you should charge more. That’s selfish, on my part, not yours. If you are prospering, I’m likely getting more of my woodworking fix.
I have every right to be a jackass! And I exercise it daily.
Pricing is more that just an equation. There are psychological aspects to it. In every industry there are price barriers. In woodworking books, one of those barriers is $20. Price something at $19 and you will sell X times more of the book than if it were $20.
So even when the manufacturing costs say the book should be $52 or $53, pricing it at $49 means more people will likely buy it (unless it sucks mouse kidneys). Your profit might be lower, but you likely will make more money in the end.
OK, now back to woodchuck humor.
“We lose money on every sale, but make it up on volume”
It seems unlikely that Chris would sell the book at a loss, so what he’s saying is that he’s taking a marginally smaller profit on each sale for the sake of selling a product of the highest, reasonable quality at a price point the market will accept. And in this case he must integrate the paper market into pricing his goods for a different market. Always charging the maximum possible price and/or always producing the cheapest possible product using the cheapest possible labor is a race to the bottom with all of the benefits flowing to the very few at the very top.
Lost Art Press is doing the right thing in maintaining a high quality product for the woodworking community. If you want to support their efforts even though Chris is not passing on the higher cost of the stick chair book, then buy both the digital and print versions. Or buy a t-shirt, pencils, dividers, . . .
Are you doing the flat picking on the music in the video as well?
Can you help compare the early adopter package to the hardbound? When the hardbound book is released, will the accompanying PDF still contain all of the construction sheets, just without the full size-patterns?
Seems if one waits to buy the hardbound book, they could opt to pay an extra $10 for the additional patterns and would then have it all: the hardcover, PDF, patterns, and construction sheets?
Hi Andy,
When the hardbound book is released, it will be $49. As always with us, for the first 30 days people who buy the book from us will also get the pdf of the book for free. The pdf-only will be $24.50. The full-size patterns will be $20 in printed for or $10 as a download.
The digital package ($25) has the book, five sheets of full-size patterns and 20 sheets of construction drawings. The book has all the dimensions you need to build the chairs, but the 20 construction sheets are a convenient luxury to have on the bench as you work. We are not going to sell the 20 construction sheets separately. Nor will they be a part of any other package.
When the hardbound book is released, the digital package goes away.
We are trying to keep things as simple as possible. Sorry if it is confusing.
That’s helpful, thanks. And makes the value of this early adopter package more clear.
I don’t want to miss out on the construction sheets, so I’ll opt for the digital package while I can.
Thank you for releasing this in this manner thus far. The book is fantastic! Best wishes on the continuing challenges.
My windows order for my shop project were delayed 6 weeks last spring. The reason I got from my supplier was that there was a global shortage of sand. Well, if there is a shortage of sand (and I read that the “dirt” needed to make the LAP mugs is also scarce), a shortage of paper seems totally normal to me.
Deep breaths indeed. Amazing the things people come up with.
May you and your Big Pulp friends continue to bring fascinating, well written, beautifully made nuggets of craft and inspiration to us poor deluded saps. And don’t forget the woodchuck humor.
Trolls can go pound sand… you know, if they can find any.
Christopher,
When I worked for the Boston Globe (1970-1981) the Globe newspaper building on Morrissey Blvd. in the Dorchester section of Boston would receive 6 to 8 50' boxcars of Newsprint per week. The warehouse at the back of the building where the paper arrived could hold 3 months worth newsprint rolls. However mid 1973 there was a rail strike of the railroads in Northern New England as well a strike of the paper mills in Maine. This cause a severe shortage of newsprint to the point one Saturday night the Globe only had 300 rolls of paper left, enough to do the run of the Sunday Globe and that was it. So something had to be done, An agreement was reached with Kreuger Paper of Montreal, PQ, to ship paper via truck. 6 to 8 tractor trailer arrived at the plant a day for just over a month. The Globe also added to the warehouse enough space to hold six months worth of newsprint. The rolls are between 1,000 and 1,500 lbs. and handled by specially equipped fork lifts to remove them from the boxcars and then stack them in the warehouse. The rolls were 2 page and 4 pages wide respectively.Today that building is being converted to office space and living space. The newspaper is printed Taunton Ma. and the editorial offices are in downtown Boston a few blocks from were the old globe building was on Newspaper Row on Washington street.
So I have idea of what you are talking about the book printing industry, albeit from 365 per day world of a daily newspaper.
Winston
interestingly, the paper shortage is related to the lumber shortage. If you’re harvesting hardwood you have a lot of soft/pulp wood to remove (generally) as part of the process. Even if you’re harvesting softwood for construction lumber, there’s a whole lot of waste. That pulpwood and forestry waste used to go to paper mills. As those were closed down over the last decade in the always wild world of paper company consolidations and ownership changes, it meant nowhere for forestry byproducts to go. And that put a lot of pressure on lumber mills. No longer an input for a different process, their waste became a liability and a cost, so a lot of them shut down or slowed way down.
Also big changes in Europe and China have curtailed supply to the U.S.