With the US industry heavily dependent on printing work done in China, the threat of new tariffs is deeply concerning
As Alan Rappaport reported in the New York Times, the new 10 percent tariffs Donald Trump has threatened to impose on $300 billion worth of goods from China as of September 1 would be in addition to the president’s previously levied penalties on “nearly everything China sends to the United States, from iPhones to New Balance sneakers to children’s books.” The new warning appears to take things beyond children’s titles and is being closely watched by the industry.
This week’s initial and precipitous downturn in the stock market relates to a fast-developing currency battle in which China softened its own currency, putting the world trading community on red alert. As we write, Beijing has begun stabilizing its currency, easing what on Monday was the worst single-day US market drop of the year. Nevertheless, the volatility of the situation is now in sharp relief, and publishing could be directly affected.
For the book industry, as Jim Milliot writes at Publishers Weekly, “The tariffs,” if actually imposed, “would cover a wide range of consumer products, including virtually all books.” Earlier this summer, a series of publishing representatives—including Lui Simpson of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), Daniel Reynolds of Workman, HarperCollins Christian’s Mark Schoenwald, Penguin Random House’s Madeline McInstosh, and others—testified in Washington about the potential effects of tariffs.
The financial issue revolves around printing American content in China. The AAP’s filing with the Trade Commission has a good account of how US publishers have chosen to use American printing first when possible, but “[t]he particular book printing and binding that is expertly and economically done in China for the US market involves long-standing specialized technical manufacturing processes resulting from global specialization that occurred decades ago, in the 1980s.” In her oral testimony to the Trade Commission, the AAP’s Simpson stressed that the industry’s “home-grown printing capacity has been extremely confined since the 1980s.” She told the Commission, “Because US publishers have no viable alternative printing sources, tariffs would be immediately devastating for the industry and its supply chain” (emphasis hers).
Bottom line: What’s revealed here is how internationally dependent the contemporary industry’s supply chain has become. Workman’s Reynolds testified in June that three-quarters of that publisher’s catalog—especially board books and four-color content “that cannot be printed in the United States due to the lack of a trained workforce and capacity”—is printed in China.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
