When you come across a book at a yard sale or a bookstore, you might pay more attention to the words between the covers than the physical form of the book itself. But content and the form are both crucial to a book’s success. Each book you pull off the shelf, is the product of thousands of decisions, big and small, tying together vast supply chains and armies of workers from around the world. 

On today’s episode, the second episode in our series: Planet Money sets out to actually write, design, and manufacture a book. We go spelunking deep inside the bowels of the publishing industrial complex. There will be trade wars, sunken cargo containers filled with lost cookbooks, deforestation regulations, and just a whiff of scratch and sniff. 

Related:
- Watch our book being printed: TikTok, Instagram, Spotify
- Episode 1: Inside a BOOK auction
- Episode 3: BOOKstore Economics
- Episode 4: How to make a BOOK into a bestseller
- The laws of the office revisited 
- Series: Planet Money makes a book 

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This episode was produced by Willa Rubin. It was edited by Jess Jiang, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, and engineered by Robert Rodriguez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer. 


Music: NPR Source Audio - “Motivation Or Mayhem,” “Missing A Deadline,” and “No Limits After All.”

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