Our BOOK vs. the global supply chain

This is Planet Money from NPR. I don't know about you, but every time I pick up a book in a bookstore at a yard sale, the things I'm mostly paying attention to are the words, you know, the title, the author's name, the actual reading material, way more than the physical package they come in. But I had an experience recently that changed all that. You see, last year, my boss's boss here on the show, my grand boss, he asked if anyone wanted to report out the story behind the making of the Planet Money book to see what it might reveal about the global economic machinery behind every book. I accepted that mission, which is how earlier this year I found myself spelunking deep inside the publishing industrial complex. I got an invitation to see one of the biggest bookmaking factories in the world, part of the Lakeside Book Company. And stepping into this place felt like stepping into Willy Wonka's factory but for books. And while I didn't find any bookish Oompa Loompas, I did meet a guy named Chris Muday, ironically, extremely chipper. Chris basically grew up at the plant. I started off in college to be a high school art teacher and then took a gap year, and that gap year has now been almost thirty nine years with the company. I come to Chris to help answer this sort of deceptively simple question. Where do your books come from? Like, in a material, physical way, what path do they take before they end up on a shelf near you? And his response was to take me on a little tour. Really what we're gonna do at this point is just walk down We head off down a meandering mile long path through a series of cavernous warehouses. For my own safety, Chris insists we stay between these little yellow lines on the floor. It's like a little yellow brick road. Yeah. Coming to see the wizard. The wizard of publishing? The wizard of printing? Printing. Yeah. The first thing that hits you in here is a sheer sense of scale. What are we looking at? This plant, Chris tells me, is a million square feet. They're constantly cranking out books twenty four hours a day. On an average day, we make about 600,000 books a day. On a great day, we're making upward of, three quarter of a million books. Wow. That's a lot of books. Absolutely. Lakeside is the biggest bible producer in the country, but they are also one of the biggest producers of the latest steamy, romantic y sensations. Every once in a while, they're entrusted with printing titles so sought after by hordes of ravenous readers, they have to hide them so that nobody could possibly sneak out a copy or get a photo of the cover. We got our secure cage, so then While those books are under embargo, they're kept in a special high security cage. We …