Our BOOK vs. the global supply chain

March 25, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

Planet Money reporter Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi tours the massive Lakeside Book Company factory in Indiana, a million-square-foot operation producing up to 750,000 books daily, from Bibles to romance novels. Amid towering paper rolls and ink vats sourced globally, veteran worker Chris Mouday explains the physical journey of books, revealing the intricate supply chains hidden in every volume on a shelf.

Crafting the Manuscript and Design

Book editor Tom Mayer at WW Norton shifts from acquiring rights—paying over a million dollars for the Planet Money book—to directing its creation. With writer Alex Mayasi and executive producer Alex Goldmark, they structure chapters around life decisions like work, family, and investing, plus big-picture economics like inflation and trade. Drafts involve intense editing cycles, battling Parkinson's Law—work expanding to fill available time—through techniques like emailing chapters or sprinting one per week.

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What you'll learn

1 (00:01) **Tour of Lakeside Book Factory**
2 (03:31) **Planet Money Book Production Begins**
3 (05:56) **Structuring Book Content**
4 (08:07) **Design and Physical Form Decisions**
5 (11:17) **Scratch & Sniff and Special Features Explored**
6 (15:51) **Battling Parkinson's Law and Deadlines**
7 (19:15) **Publication Date and Printing Location Debate**

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

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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