Books

Production

Over the 20th century, the way books were both published and distributed changed substantially, contributing to a system based on the production—and, in many cases, the overproduction—of massive numbers of books every year. A booming paperback industry contributed greatly to this postwar abundance of reading material as did the rise of “big box” chain stores in the 1980s and 1990s, bringing the book market to consumers in smaller cities and suburbs.

Inexact and conflicting as they might be, figures on the number of books published each year are available, and these estimates suggest that the industrial-scale production of books is a massive potential source of material waste. Bowker, the company responsible for assigning ISBN numbers to published books, determined that 288,355 new U.S. book titles and editions were published in 2009. This means that approximately 794 books are published every day (around 33 new titles per hour). This figure does not, however, take into account the exponential growth of the “publication on demand” industry being pioneered by small presses. When the estimated 764,448 new titles and reprints produced in these nontraditional venues are accounted for, the United States published over a million new titles and reprints in 2009.

The total number of books published each year is likewise difficult to establish with any certainty. For trade books, the average “first run” of any new title is around 5,000 copies for a medium-sized publisher and 10,000 for the larger publishing houses. These numbers, however, can vary significantly; a first printing for a cultural phenomenon such as the Harry Potter series can run to several million copies, while the small presses catering to the “on demand” market can print as few as one copy at a time. Estimates that account for every major publication category (adult and juvenile trade, mass-market paperbacks, religious, professional/scholarly, university press, elementary, high school, and college texts) suggest that nearly 2.5 billion units were published in 2005, the largest share of those (nearly 1 billion) coming from trade books.

Disposal

Unfortunately, none of these figures help resolve the problem of determining how many of the books purchased in any given year end up in the trash. The findings of a landfill excavation project conducted by William Rathje of the University of Arizona suggest that paper is the greatest contributor to the municipal waste stream. The study attributes much of this paper waste to two sources: telephone directories and newspapers. However, considering the massive numbers of trade books published over the course of a year, it is reasonable to conclude that the multibillion dollar publishing industry makes a substantial contribution to the mass of waste paper consigned to the landfill every year.

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