Books overboard! Supply chain headaches leave publishing all at sea
The supply chain crisis over the last year has caused quite a splash for the book publishing industry – literally.
In early January, a large shipping vessel coming from Taiwan was stalled in the mid-Atlantic, its arrival into the port of New York delayed by port congestion. Intemperate weather – huge waves and powerful ocean winds – knocked 60 containers overboard. Another 89 containers were damaged as the ship rolled in the waves.
Inside the containers were two highly anticipated cookbooks scheduled for release this spring: Turkey and the Wolf by the New Orleans chef Mason Hereford and Dinner in One by the New York Times columnist Melissa Clark.
“The good news is that there were no critical injuries, as can happen in these situations. But the bad news is the books might be in a cargo container at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean,” Hereford wrote on Instagram, saying it was the “most hilariously 2022 thing to happen yet this year”. Both authors pushed back their books’ release dates to later in the year.
The loss of the books to the stormy seas almost seems like too apt a metaphor for the strain and chaos the coronavirus pandemic has inflicted on the publishing industry as it struggles to cope with supply issues, paper shortages and a surge in demand.
The effects of the crisis have been far-reaching: even Donald Trump has weighed in, lamenting to Fox News about delays in printing more copies of a photo book of his presidency, titled Our Journey Together, that is being printed by Donald Trump Jr’s publishing company.
According to Trump, the book’s printer told him, “Well, we have one problem: We can’t get paper. We can’t get ink. We can’t get glue. We can’t get leather for the covers.”
While these issues are new to Trump, the
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