London Speaker Meeting: Book Production – A Matter of Ethics?

Posted on June 19, 2008 in Uncategorized

May’s speaker meeting covered the issue of ethics in book production, a topic that is gaining more and more attention both inside the publishing industry and without, and seems to be of particular interest to young publishers – last year’s SYP annual conference took ethical publishing as its theme.

Chairing the discussion was Ashley Lodge, Corporate Responsibility Manager at HarperCollins UK and Chair of the Publishers’ Green Network. He was joined by David Penfold, who teaches digital media and technology change within the Publishing MA at London College of Communication; Alex Markham, who works in Environment and Health and Safety at Reed Elsevier; and Sam Mawson, Project Controller in the production department at Egmont UK.

Ashley opened the proceedings by explaining his background and the origin of his current role at HCUK. Starting off as a dictionary editor, he climbed the editorial ranks to become commissioning editor at HarperCollins. In 2005, a staff engagement and renewal plan gave him the opportunity to involve himself in the green policies of his company, and the role grew to a full-time position, in which he devotes around 75 per cent of his time to environmental initiatives and the remaining 25 per cent to charity projects.

Reducing energy and water consumption, as Ashley went on to say, is one aspect (not exclusive to publishing houses) of ethical working practice, but issues more specifically associated with the industry include paper, ink and glue usage, returns, and the question of how green the e-book really is; all points that were covered during the discussion.

David Penfold spoke about the role that publishing education plays in ethical issues. He pointed out that, although he thought that publishing education could be doing more to promote ethical working practices, this seems to be an area of interest to many students, citing the example of Publishing MA students at LCC who refused to fly to Barcelona on a study trip last year. Several dissertations have also been focused on production ethics, with one original survey finding that most people asked are in favour of ethical working practices, but many are not able, or in some instances not willing, to pay the associated costs. The realities of cost constraints were demonstrated in an anecdote about a student magazine – the students working on it were keen to use recycled paper in a bid to be ethical, but as they were getting much of the paper they were using for free they were unable to be too discerning about what they eventually used.

Alex Markham took ‘how green are e-books’ as his starting point, and described a full life-cycle analysis of Fuel, one of the magazines published by Elsevier. A life-cycle study involves breaking down every single aspect of the production process and assessing all the energy that goes into making a product. In fact, this may not even be possible, as you may end up looking at all the energy in the universe but, as Alex stated, it all boils down to understanding how much energy is taken from the sun and utilised in making the magazine.

Fuel, Alex told us, volunteered for the project, which demonstrates the importance of getting people on-side – the ability to communicate is the most important tool when you work in CSR, as it can be difficult for one person to make much of a difference.

The five stages involved in the life-cycle analysis were as follows:

Preparation of the magazine – Kiddlington
Typesetting – India
Printing and distribution (hard copies) – UK
Online hosting – US
Ecological footprint (the physical space needed to support enough plants to produce the energy needed to make the product)

The study looked at whether there was any benefit in not sending out hard copies of the magazine, and providing it on the internet instead. In the case of Fuel, the end-user result is actually the most important factor. Environmentally speaking, the project found that there is not much difference between print and online delivery, but a lot of difference is made by how people use the end product – whether they print or photocopy it, for example. This means that the magazine’s producers can try to influence the way that people use their product, and advise them of the best way to read it if they want to be environmentally friendly and use less energy. As Alex pointed out, though some may think that this project hasn’t actually changed anything, ‘if you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it’; the information is now there.

Sam Mawson’s focus was paper – ‘the life blood of printing’ – perhaps unsurprisingly given that he started his publishing career as PA to Alison Kennedy, Egmont’s production director, who has been instrumental in making publishers aware of where their paper actually comes from. Pressure from NGOs on publishers to find out what the paper they were using was made of and where it came from proved fairly fruitless, until Alison Kennedy, working with consultants, came up with the Egmont grading system. Egmont were faced with the challenge of identifying and breaking down the components and sources of 160 papers, some of which had up to ten pulp sources. By October 2005, they had achieved clean status, and published the first book made completely of FSC-approved paper (including the cover and endpapers). In September 2006, they began to extend the Egmont grading system to the rest of the publishing industry – at this stage, around 45 per cent of the publishing industry have adopted the systems (see PREPS), and this number is gradually creeping up.

Sam went on to speak about ethics and obligations in publishing, particularly focusing on China, and the question of whether we should be working there at all, though if publishers didn’t print in the Far East, many types of books wouldn’t be affordable or feasible to produce. The key, Sam suggested, is to thoroughly know your suppliers. Egmont has a code of conduct, laying out certain criteria that all their suppliers have to meet, including no child labour, using only voluntary workers, complying with wage laws in that country, and maintaining a safe working and living environment. To ensure that these conditions are met, a supplier must pass the Egmont audit or an ICTI care audit, both of which are carried out by a third party, therefore ensuring that the auditors and inspectors are independent from anyone who might profit.

Ashley summarised the meeting followed by questions from the audience, the first of which was whether the speakers think that publishers are keen on environmental and ethical work practice because they really care or because it’s a fashionable cause at the moment. All the speakers agreed that although good PR isn’t a bad thing, ethical working practice is actually very hard to achieve and people wouldn’t be doing it if they didn’t genuinely care. They also suggested that the UK publishing industry has actually been ahead of consumer demand in this area.

The next question was whether NGOs such as Greenpeace were the real motivators in the move towards ethical practice in the publishing industry. The consensus was that the awareness initially came from such organisations, who have the resources to go and research these issues, but that the important thing was how companies then react to such information.

Ashley was then asked what, if he had a magic wand, would he change with returns policies. Ashley told us that in an ideal world, he would end shredding, as this is an inefficient use of a product – he would implement cross-industry collaboration to get unsold books to charities and in use to raise literacy levels – he is in fact in discussion about this at the moment.

In answer to whether big companies or independents are making more headway in working ethically and environmentally, we were told that even a small group of people can make a difference, but as independents produce a smaller amount of books, a smaller sector of the market is influenced. This is where the Publishers Green Network comes in – it aims to share information with everyone in the industry, and to help smaller publishers who may not have the resources to go green all by themselves. Sam also pointed out that PREPS can help smaller publishers to provide answers about their paper sources that they may not have the resources to investigate.

The final question returned to the eternal question of how to make the e-book a serious green option. This is still an issue that is difficult to assess until the industry knows a little more about how e-books and e-book readers will develop – until a unified format that will work across the industry is identified or comes to the fore, it is not really an option to instigate studies looking into the carbon footprint of e-book readers and e-books.