Publisher Goes Green
by Bonnie Alter, London on 02.17.08
Dorling Kindersley is a much-loved publishing company that is famous for its travel books, Eyewitness series and children's books. Not the only ones or the first to have gone green in the publishing world, they have made the difficult, expensive and important decision with their new imprint, called Made with Care, to go completely eco from start to finish. Appropriately enough, the first books to be published will be a gardening guide, Grow Organic, and a baby manual, Green Babycare.
The books will not have a hard cover, instead they will have unbleached covers which are 100% recycled. They will be printed on FSC certified paper, using vegetable inks and environmentally friendly glues. The binding will be energy-saving "in-line" binding done in Germany to save travel miles. All the back pages will have a panel outlining the environmental efforts taken. They will be sold using little printed marketing materials which is a big risk since reviewers love hard copies. Instead they will be flogged through the company's website and a CD. The publisher said "We've taken our time and gone through the processes step-by-step to pick up all the loopholes. We don't want to be seen as greenwashing." By the year end they hope to introduce more green standards including a guarantee that no child labour was used in the manufacturing. :: Guardian
This is fantastic news! It's great to see the big publishers following in the footsteps of what some of the little guys have been doing for years. I was fortunate enough to publish a book with Kedzie Press (http://www.kedziepress.com), a green publisher that takes on all of these green initiatives and takes it one step further...they plant a tree for every book sold.
Greetings to DK. This is definitely an important step!
I understand that at this stage this initiative is limited only to four books and I hope that DK will broaden their green efforts to other books they publish as well.
I also hope that DK will also include in their future green plans the usage of recycled paper for the books themselves and not only for the cover. This is a significant part of any environmental initiative and paper policy in the book publishing industry, as we can see from other green initiatives in the book industry, from The Green Press Initiative's Treatise to initiatives taken by big publishers such as Random House, Simon & Schuster and Scholastic.
Raz Godelnik
Eco-Libris
www.ecolibris.net