Damage Control: Advice from a Professional Book Repairer
Thursday, March 26th, 2009
In the book industry, “pristine” is the word wholesalers and retailers use to describe books that are in saleable condition. If a book isn’t pristine (which means “absolutely flawless” in this context), it’s sent straight back to the publisher. Its fate—pulping, free giveaway, remaindering, years of gathering dust in a warehouse—is determined from there.
We recently spoke with Debbie Purrington of Ingram Book Company, the industry’s largest wholesaler, who spends her time doing fix-up jobs on the slightly imperfect books Ingram receives from printers. Debbie’s workstation in Ingram’s Tennessee warehouse checks books for twenty types of damage, including dented spines, torn pages, creased dust jackets, oozing glue, unsmoothed Mylar, and printing errors such as missing sections or upside-down pages (which, she says, happens more frequently than you may think). If the damage is too extensive to repair, the pallets of books are returned directly to the publisher. But if there’s something Debbie or her colleagues can fix, she sets to work. The book repair station, which is operated by only one person at a time, mends between 50 and 100 books per shift. The books Debbie fixes have not seen the rough-and-tumble of shipping through the supply chain (in other words, she won’t fix your books that got damaged because the UPS guy dropped them), but her tactics, outlined below, can help any author or small publisher for whom creased, dented, unsellable books can be a huge revenue drain. continue reading
