Bookselling This Week, the newsletter of the American Booksellers Association, reports that some customers are reluctant to buy books printed in China, particularly children's titles.
So now, besides concerns about the environment that led Thomas Nelson to print its first "green" Bible, publishers must be alert that the manufacturing process for their books avoids any chemicals that may be toxic.
The fact is that book-making can be a messy and complicated process. In a Newsweek article about Amazon's release of the new Kindle reader, Bill Hill, an expert on e-reading at Microsoft, states,
We chop down trees, transport them to plants, mash them into pulp, move the pulp to another factory to press into sheets, ship the sheets to a plant to put dirty marks on them, then cut the sheets and bind them, and ship the thing around the world...
Nevertheless, the Bible reminds us in that favorite verse of publishers: "Of making many books there is no end." (Ecclesiastes 12:12)