How a Book Is Made – Ink, Paper and a 200k-Pound Printer | Hacker News Reader

How a Book Is Made – Ink, Paper and a 200k-Pound Printer

nytimes.com

145 pointspseudolus51 comments

The process that makes those 800 lb. rolls of paper is every bit as complex and interesting as the printing. I worked in a paper mill for several summers, and later on worked for a couple of years on the lumberjack end (much more fun).

The paper-making machines dwarf that printing-press. There are groups of rollers that weigh more than it!

(3 minute short-course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmgMdDH14sE )

About a year ago, I came across a book printing service [1] and didn't realize until that point, how accessible and cheap high quality book printing was. So I collected all the (poetry) content I could from my blog, had my partner take care of the drawings and published a book [2] with a proper ISBN and everything in two weeks. It was a great experience, learning about all different terminologies, layout design, color profiles, etc. The color profile thing was specially tricky.

And once we started giving them away to friends and family, I realized how much more effective print media is in the world of endless online content. They all read and talked about it while the same content had been on online on my blog for the past decade or so without it receiving much attention.

[1]: https://mixam.com.au/hardcoverbooks

[2]: https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Duoverse.html?id=Qco...

Heh. In the early 90s I studied journalism and graphic design at college, and interned at a small town newspaper in the summers. It was a great learning opportunity - I did everything from writing stories to selling ads to helping run the giant press, including plating, inking and manhandling the 800lb rolls of newsprint onto the machine.

Then I went into tech, specifically the web, and literally haven't seen a press in person or stepped into a newsroom since then. If I could, I would go back in time and transfer to UIUC in 1992 instead and go help Marc and Eric develop Mosaic, but what can you do?

Anyways, as someone who has done the dirty job (The ink! The ink! Everywhere!) of printing, I really have no illusions about the long lost art of book making going away. It's an inefficient, dirty, dangerous, wasteful business that is, honestly at this point, simply making more landfill.

> wasteful business that is, honestly at this point, simply making more landfill.

I'm pretty sure that, on average, web pages rot much faster than the time it takes a book to reach the landfill. I have lots of books that I got used, many of them for free. There is probably a book exchange in your city as well, look it up.

So clueless. Have you ever worked at book store? Do you know what happens to unsold inventory? Why don't you look it up?

Just because you have a precious book or two you love so much and will cherish forever (well, until you die and your family throws them all away), it doesn't mean that particular book is special in any way. In order for your own copy to get into your grubby little hands, at least a dozen more were printed and destroyed.

Something like 77 million unsold books destroyed per year. The waste is mind boggling and in today's world, completely unnecessary.

Personally, I like my text on a screen and my trees in the ground as living plants, not landfill.

Why do you have to express your opinion in the form of a personal attack? Been a long day? I hope you have a better one tomorrow.

Yeah, please accept my apology and ignore me being a dickhead. I need to tone it down.

Easy, tiger. From the HN guidelines, which make this one of the most civilized places on the web:

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

I respect your opinion, but couldn't disagree more. I hope the printed book never goes away.

I love books more than I love reading. In my living room, I converted the longest wall, flow to ceiling, with bookcases and filled them with books. Excellent sounds proofing, looks great, and entertains you.

My aunt, recently retired from the printing industry, has regaled me with many tales of the intricacies and complications she went through to print everything from Harry Potter to Jocko Willink. Kindles were also banned from entering her home.

By all means, regale away!

> Kindles were also banned from entering her home.

There's an idea!

Contrast that with this old-school book printing process from 1947. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3rlsj-KEZE

Now compare that to the early days of printing. That difference is much larger.

Ink is the very devil. Too much dense ink in parts of the page can make a nightmare come true. A lot of the invisible smarts are managing ink flow at every level from page layout onward.

Back in the old days, cheap labour coloured in images by hand. Sometimes, they corrected late-stage typos and print errors by hand too. This is sort-of related to the origin story of "tuppence coloured, a penny plain" although thats about prints more than machine printing (although a printed handsheet was pretty mechanised)

I've bought books which had correction slips in them (mainly textbooks)

And water flow. Offset printing is lithography, and lithography is a delicate balance between oil (ink) and water.

Yea. I'd love to do that. I must think about going to a printmaking workshop and reconnecting with this stuff.

Is that... Kilopounds?

We also use kpsi/ksi for 1000 psi. There's a bunch of weird stuff in the imperial system you learn during college for mechE.

Kilopounds, or just 1000 pounds? K is commonly used as an abbreviation for 1000.

Oh I know. I get it. It just sounds weird as F to a European. Imperial scales don't increase in nice multiples of 10/100/1000. I remember Imperial weight measurements as grain, ounce, pound, stone, quarter, hundred weight, ton. In Ireland back in the 70s/80s if you were asked your weight, you'd give it in stones, pounds and ounces (and of course, you had to remember how many of one was in the other). I don't remember "old money" but I'm old enough to remember adults talk about how much something cost "in old money" (£,S,D) and being a child of the 70s, I laughed and wondered how the hell they calculated anything back then when a shilling was 12d and there were 240d in a £. It's why I've always found it odd that the US stuck hard to measurement systems that are inherently difficult to remember and calculate because they don't use multiples of 10/100/1000, and easy type of measurement uses its own words and multiples.

So kilopound... Sounds weird.

You might find this to be an interesting watch:

[1]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=iJymKowx8cY / "a defense of the imperial measurement system: it's not as bad as people say it is (but it is still pretty bad)"

The primary point of the Imperial "system" is that it's not a single system. The fact that there are 5280 feet in a mile might seem insane, but feet and miles are from different systems, and they are used for entirely different things. For example, when driving in a car, distances are measured in miles, and if you were to direct someone to make a turn, you would say "turn right in 0.25 mile", not "700 feet". It's a compelling argument, and it's largely tempered my opinion of the USA's systems of measurement.

Imperial measures were not about scale. They were about picking something one can easily relate to and then use that to express the quantity. If one needs more then 2 digits, one pick up a new thing as a reference. For more precision halve or quarter was used, as they were easily relate to, than decimal fractions. And for even more precision bigger units were serving as a common base to subtract with smaller units to express variations from the base.

For example one uses inches to measure things one can handle with hands as the inch is related to fingers. Then one use feet to measure size of houses. For a height of a person one uses 5 feet as a base (in past height outside that was much less common in adults) and inches to express the difference from the base.

From that point of view measuring the weight of person in pounds is a wrong way to apply imperial system as it requires 3 digits. It used to be stones. Typically one can guess a person weight in stones with no problem. And even when dieting a change of weight in one pound is mostly noise. The real change is more on the scale of quarter/third of stone.

As an American I see imperial as no worse than time measurements. There are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes per hour, 24 hours per day, 7 days in a week, ~4 weeks in a month (which can be from 28-31 days, depending) and 12 months/52 weeks in a year.

If you can manage to keep all this straight (and from what I can tell the rest of the world has no trouble using clocks and calendars) then you won't have much trouble with inches/feet/miles or ounces/pounds/tons since it's pretty much the same deal.

As a kid, I used to wonder why time was never "corrected" into an easy-to-calculate system. Our calendars have months of varying length and nonsensical names (SEPTember, OCTober, NOVember and DECember should be they 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th months, but that didn't stop someone from shoving new months behind them to honour emporers).

While 60, 60, 24, 7, 12, 365 don't make much sense (and might be improved on) the problem is that time and date are based on the planet's orbit and rotation, which makes days inconsistent. (I've never worked out how Planck time divides into earth's rotation or orbit, but I'm sure it's not assume lovely round number like 1x10^x). If we wanted the same number of "units" in every year (standardising on our solar orbit and killing of the leap year) then "1 O'Clock" would slowly drift throughout each day. We'd look back and say, "Oh, do your remember when we were kids and 1 o'clock was around mid-day?"

Other measurements like weight, length (and therefore speed, acceleration) are not bound to something variable like night and day, winter and summer.

I wonder what the carbon footprint of these industrial printing presses is and how it compares to crypto mining or NFTs or whatever it is that's fashionable to complain about nowadays?

I haven't done the actual math but I'd estimate you could print, bind, package and deliver a book using less energy than it takes to perform a single bitcoin transaction.

I'd genuinely be interested in seeing the math behind that reasoning. Not because I think it's true or not true, but because I just genuinely have no idea so would like to see how this sort of comparison is calculated.

The last time I actually did do the math, the base figure for completion of 1 bitcoin transaction was somewhere north of a megawatt-hour of electrical energy.

To put this in perspective, you could run the "average" American home for over a month with 1 MWh. At scale, I don't think it requires the energy consumption of an entire American household over the course of a month to produce a single book.

Why isn't more of this process automated?

I'm sure it is, I doubt for example all the print on demand paperbacks are done like this. So I assume the machines are still used simply because they still work. Maybe the quality is better, but for each of these machines that get replaced I'm sure a minority are replaced with like equipment.

It's likely cheaper to have people that to automate further. One problem with automation is that if you are making bespoke products, engineering and capital costs for the automation cost more than a person.

A printing press operator costs ~$67k/year ($45k salary + benefits + etc). Automating a step can easily cost $100-200k, plus 10-20% of that in yearly maintenance, so if the task being performed is changing more than once every few years its cheaper for a person to do it.

Humans are very good at tasks involving hand-eye coordination and machines are good at extremely repetitive tasks. Most of the people in the article seemed to be doing tasks that automation is not yet good at. The book cover had standard CMYK printing plus some special inks to help it stand out. Automation could easily check the CMYK inks, but not the special inks, as they likely fall out of the sRGB color range that off the shelf cameras are able to sense (you likely would have to use several BW cameras with special filters).

The automated version doesn’t have a human in the loop that can spot problems, errors etc either.

Automation and digital processes have removed a lot of labor in the past few decades. Traditional prepress is history, and makereadies go much faster because of computer controls and scanning systems on press.

Why does this process exist anymore?

Book binding might as well go the way of vinyl records. The digital product is just as good if not better.

The future of printed books may be just curios that very few people collect, to have a physical product in their hands and for nostalgia.

Digital books (on e-paper anyway) cannot yet handle the range of colors paper can. OLED can do this much better than paper but it also requires much more energy than e-paper.

Long term I wonder how long digital books will last. After the apocalypse paper books will still be readable but will we have the devices, the batteries, the Internet-connected DRM systems etc to read digital books?

All that said I still buy mostly e-books when color doesn't matter. I used to own a printing business, so I feel some nostalgia about paper books, but the sheer tonnage of paper books in my house is threatening to condense into a mini black hole, so e-books it is for me from now on.

Vinyl records are popular again.

Have you heard about the resurgence in vinyl record sales?

https://www.tennessean.com/story/entertainment/music/2022/01...

While I appreciate you sharing this article, my free reads on New York Times have long been used up, and I don't plan to buy a subscription. But I've been to a book "factory" at Anadolu University in Eskisehir, Turkey. The printers ARE huge!

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It's leet hacking in Missouri.

I'm beginning to think that owning a browser is hacking in Missouri

What are cookies?

Just kidding. I always forget stuff like that. Thanks for the "Pro Tip"

check out if your local library allows a 1 or 3-day passes of NYTimes digital, for example LAPL [1] and Berkley PL [2] allows something like this:

[1] https://www.lapl.org/new-york-times-digital

[2] https://www.berkeleypubliclibrary.org/explore/elibrary/new-y...

I live in the Philippines. There is no public anything here, LOL

I turn off JavaScript on the NYTimes site.

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