Observations on quality in book manufacturing and publishing

What is quality? 

In order to make quality measurable and enforceable, we must operate with an industrial definition of quality. This definition is fundamentally conformity—conformity with a set of rules. For books, which are typically produced in runs of thousands, this means conformity of one book with all others.

The book is a cultural product, and as such, we are often at risk of using non-quantitative, even sentimental, measures. I recall German bookbinders who deemed books bound with dispersion adhesives as "quality" and everything else as "cheap," yet they never bothered with page-pull tests, as books were "supposed to be handled with care." This is a misleading perspective. Quality is not created by a hardcover, gilt-edging, or gold blocking. The cheapest paperback book, if manufactured within tight tolerances, can be of immaculate quality.

Begin with counts

Quality begins, surprisingly, with counts. More than 40 years ago, on my first day in the quality assurance section of a South-German machine factory, I was instructed to count lots of machined parts. All of them were off by considerable numbers. This seemingly simple oversight led to a major scandal, as experienced staff had long ceased bothering with counting. Enigmatic inefficiencies were suddenly explained. Since then, "what about counts" has been my first question when discussing quality.

The book world is not immune to this oversight. I am continually surprised that book publishers consider DIFOT (Delivered in full on time) with a quota of 90% sufficient. Furthermore, they frequently tolerate being invoiced for up to 20% more books than ordered. For a publisher with 1,000 titles and an average print run of 2,000, this creates an inventory imprecision of around half a million books! Cleaning up that disparity would be like mining gold.

Counts are equally vital for the printer and binder, as a book is assembled from over a dozen components. Under-counting a single component and requiring an extra make-ready is a disaster.

Finally, the most critical aspect of counts is avoiding the production of anything not needed or too much of anything. For any book manufacturing operation, the most valuable commodity for efficiency and quality is space. Tremendous gains in profitability can be made by strictly adhering to a "just-in-time" approach. A good practice, for example, is never starting to print book contents until all required covers or cases are available in the bindery. Covers are a small fraction of the material volume; having a much larger volume of printed pages blocking space because covers are missing is tragic.

Between counting, measuring, and weighing, counting is by far the easiest and, therefore, possibly underrated. Yet, counting can create a lot of value.

Paper and tolerances

Whenever I pick up a book, I gauge the paper between my thumb and index finger. Good, high-density paper is essential for me to judge a book as good or excellent quality. What I intensely dislike is a publisher choosing a low-density, fluffy paper merely to make the book appear thicker. Once I get that impression, any aesthetic appeal is lost, and often, the spongy paper leads to further quality discrepancies. From an engineering perspective, the continued design of machines under the assumption that spongy papers will be used makes the equipment more expensive and complicated to operate.

In the book world, acceptable tolerances are easy to define: If a book has no discrepancies visible to the naked eye, it is perfect. However, the naked eye is unforgiving. For instance, when gluing a hardcover book into its case square and parallel, an untrained eye can spot a difference of less than a tenth of a millimeter. The standard for perfection is, therefore, extremely high.no

Kai Buentemeyer is a director at Bindwel-Stelda group.