Paper waste?

January 25, 2008 10:51 AM

Don't publishers waste a significant amount of money and paper by including blank pages at the begining and end of their books? I have seen as much as six blank pages included at the begining and end of books. Now if the book becomes a hot seller and sells let's say 500,000 copies, that's 2 million blank white pages if it has as little as four blank pages. Don't publishers keep this in mind? Or is the cost of paper insignificant? The environmental factor should be considered as well as the monetary one of "wasting" so much paper.
posted by princeofpersiaxz to media & arts (22 comments total)

Actually, there is a reason for this.

Books are not printed page by page, but instead they are printed in flat sheets made up of multiple pages that are then folded into "signatures" and bound together into a book.
It may be 8 to a sheet or 16 or even more.

This means that if the printed pages of the actual manuscript don't come out in a multiple of the signature size, they must insert blank pages to make up the difference.

Yes, publishers work with printers to ensure that they waste as little paper as possible. Paper is expensive and the publishers don't want to throw away money on paper if they can avoid it.
posted by SallyHitMeOntheHead at 10:56 AM on January 25 [2 favorites]

Please take out a book and look at its binding. If you look closely, you will see something that looks like this:

VVVVVVVVVV

Each of those Vs is a bundle of paper. One sheet is folded in half, and is printed on as many sides as there is text. All pages are printed in groups of 2 or 4.

While it may seem as though there are tons of blank pages in a book, you're really just seeing the 1/4 of the page that's not being used for anything. If anything, they're being more conservative with their paper than most, not less.
posted by headspace at 10:57 AM on January 25

(Combine mine and Sally's and you have the whole thing.)
posted by headspace at 10:58 AM on January 25

See this link .... http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Basic_Book_Design/Number_of_Pages
posted by ChuckHur at 11:00 AM on January 25

When books are published, the binding forces the book to be laid out in signatures. These signatures are 16-page bundles, sewn into the book spine. For ease of use and layout, these signature sizes are usually not reduced, making the number of pages in a book necessarily divisible by 16. If the book is going to have 181 pages of content, it'll require 12 signatures, which is 192 pages- leaving 11 pages blank, left on either side between the content and the bookcovers.
posted by duende at 11:00 AM on January 25

Books are bound in sets of pages called signatures - a single piece of paper that has been folded several times to create 4 (folio), 8 (quarto), etc. pages. If the page numbers of the book don't match exactly, they leave extra pages. When printing and binding, it's cheaper to follow a standard signature size than it is to try to cut out the extra blank pages.
posted by Paragon at 11:00 AM on January 25

Oo, sorry for the quarto answer. Yeah, what the others said.
posted by Paragon at 11:02 AM on January 25

I picked a random hardcover novel off a shelf in my living room. It had three unnecessary blank pages in the final signature of 16 pages. So I flipped through it and found many, many paragraphs with a single word on the final line. Tightening the kerning in these paragraphs would easily have reduced the overall page count by thirteen.

So to answer your question: yes, publishers waste a significant amount of money and paper like this. Since I have had little success getting full-time work in book publishing, my guess is that the cost of the waste is less than the cost of hiring one more editor or typesetter.
posted by ten pounds of inedita at 11:05 AM on January 25

In addition to the signatures issue described above, this site also presents another reason why you might find blank pages in a book:

Almost all books have blank pages. Why? Well, most chapters always start on the right, therefor, if the previous chapter ends on the right, or "odd numbered" page, a blank page must proceed after it, to allow the next chapter to start on the right.
posted by burnmp3s at 11:06 AM on January 25

Publishers are very aware of the signatures in their books. When I worked in house at a publishing company, we often tested various font sizes/page layouts to try to get the correct page number so as not to add another signature and waste paper (and money). There was nothing worse than not being able to get the page layout to work and adding another 8 page signature that had 7 blank pages in it. Plus, aesthetically it looks awful.
posted by meerkatty at 11:09 AM on January 25 [1 favorite]

Anyone who's paid for college books knows that the cost of paper has little bearing on the price charged for the book. You can be sure they recoup the cost.
posted by furtive at 11:12 AM on January 25

Okay, side question. Given that perfect binding - as used in paperbacks where all the pages are sort of just stacked up individually and then glued together - doesn't keep the pages in signatures in the finished product, do they still print them that way?

I could see them printing those pages in signatures out of habit and then just slicing off the edge to create individual pages right before the glue and cover go on. Or I could see there being some completely other method of doing paperback pages. And I have seen blank pages in the back of paperbacks before, but it seems to be less common.
posted by Naberius at 11:13 AM on January 25

I could see them printing those pages in signatures out of habit

It's probably not out of habit but out of cost if they do so.
posted by mkb at 11:20 AM on January 25

Yes, perfect bound books are printed in signatures. A huge press is set up that way. The folding and gathering into sigs is an unavoidable part of printing on large rolls or (less commonly) large sheets.

It's true, designers and typesetters have some measure of control over this, but think of it this way: the designer tightens in as much as possible, but then corrections come in, paragraphs get added, and you have to add a sig. Bleh. The typesetter doesn't know if the corrections will be cuts or additions. But by the time they come in, the design is set, there's only so much you can reasonably do. Plus, the vast majority of books sell 5,000 copies or less, so the volume hardly ever works out to millions of pages.
posted by rikschell at 11:43 AM on January 25

So I flipped through it and found many, many paragraphs with a single word on the final line. Tightening the kerning in these paragraphs would easily have reduced the overall page count by thirteen.

I think you're overly optimistic about just how time-consuming (and paper-consuming in itself) this strategy would be. Editors, copyeditors and designers already spend time working together to eliminate widows and orphans, and it's more complicated than you'd think. It's more than just tightening kerning; it's like putting a puzzle together. To essentially begin treating every paragraph break as a page break would take a lot more than just two new employees per publisher.
posted by lampoil at 11:45 AM on January 25 [3 favorites]

Beautifully typeset books are a thing of glory. A book that's too tightly kerned would be a bitch to read, and look ugly as hell. Better to go with cheaper, thinner (recycled) paper stock and keep the layout legible and enjoyable.
posted by Gucky at 12:27 PM on January 25

Also, global letter spacing is tracking. Letter-specific letter spacing is kerning. JUST SAYING.
posted by wemayfreeze at 12:32 PM on January 25 [7 favorites]

Blank pages at the end of books are very useful for notes.
posted by washburn at 1:50 PM on January 25

I think about this every single time I watch Battlestar Galactica. They chop off all the corners of memos and books, to make them octagonal-shaped. Aside from all the triangle waste, it means that the margins must be larger so that the rectangular-shaped content (the text) can fit inside the page nicely. This creates more pages = more trees. And aren't trees at a premium in space?
posted by iamkimiam at 2:00 PM on January 25 [2 favorites]

I think you're overly optimistic about just how time-consuming (and paper-consuming in itself) this strategy would be. Editors, copyeditors and designers already spend time working together to eliminate widows and orphans, and it's more complicated than you'd think.

Given that I did it for a living for eight years, it's exactly as complicated as I think.

I was simplifying in my off-the-cuff remark, but as an example, in one job I was the final eye for up to 120 pages of daily print, including eliminating widows and orphans where possible (and my rule of thumb was no more than 3% compression or expansion, beyond which it is noticeable), vertical justification, resetting headings, adjusting leading, and on and on. I would do a run of this formatting before the final copyedit and what would typically be a less strenuous run of formatting after the final copyedit.

I know for a fact that it's doable; the question is whether it's a significant waste compared to the cost of staffing. I agree with you that the cost of staffing is most often higher.

(Yeah, wemayfreeze, tracking/kerning.)
posted by ten pounds of inedita at 2:53 PM on January 25

I think leaving blank pages at the beginning and end of the text block (as the pages are called) also ensures that no text will be lost if these pages tear loose, as can happen (splitting between the cover and the text block).

Cheap paperbacks (which are bound differently) often start their text on the very first page, though usually it's blurbs and the like; I've seen PBs with the last page of the book on the very last page of the text block. These pages can fall out.
posted by bad grammar at 5:50 PM on January 26

What everyone else said about signatures. Also page counts are often set early in the process, based on a rough castoff or (sometimes) wishful thinking. Bids will be gathered and cover prices set with those page counts in mind. Squeezing type to save a signature is not welcome when it means production will have to get new quotes, the cover template will need to be adjusted, price may have to change, etc. etc. Not to mention that most books are cataloged and sold in well in advance. A bookstore is unlikely to cut its order when it finds that 400-page novel is now 384, but why invite trouble when you don't need to? Much more efficient to get an accurate castoff and stick with your original page count. Also relevant is the customer's perception of value. Some types of books sell better at certain lengths; there is such a thing as too short. (Though this can be manipulated by paper bulk, of course, though I digress...)
posted by libraryhead at 6:18 PM on January 26 [1 favorite]