Paper

Trying to decipher paper pricing trends is like scrutinizing snowflakes—the closer you get, the more complex they seem. Still, there are a few key factors when considering the current economics of the paper business, which has been subject to unprecedented forces during and in the wake of the recent recession.

Resolute Forest Products (NYSE: ABH) (TSX: ABH) and National Envelope today announced a unique partnership that will provide customers with an expanded portfolio of solutions, including folio-size sheets using Resolute’s innovative, high-yield, sustainable paper. This alliance is an integral part of both companies’ continued emphasis on providing customers with industry-leading eco-friendly solutions. Resolute recently launched Align™, its family of high-opacity, high-bulk, environmentally responsible papers that can be used as alternatives to chemical pulp coated and uncoated freesheet in most commercial printing applications. When compared to traditional offset papers, Align grades deliver a smaller environmental footprint and greater cost savings to customers.

Rapper Snoop Dogg is about to enter the book publishing market with a book that you can not only read, but smoke.

What?

Time reported that "Rolling Words: A Smokable Songbook" will be released from Snoop as a marketing campaign for his new Kingsize Slim Rolling Papers.

In a video for the book, Snoop Dogg says that the book reprints lyrics to his past songs like "G-Thang" and "Gin and Juice." He tells fans, "This thing can also be smoked with some of your finest, where you at or however you at."

To survive and thrive as the book industry's digital revolution pushes forward, and as better inventory management drives the shift toward smaller print runs, the smarter printers are doing everything they can to ensure they'll be a part of that ongoing transformation. This includes incorporating newer technologies with an ever sharper focus on customer support and service. Book Business spoke with executives from Quad/Graphics, BookMasters, Sheridan Books, Walsworth and Thomson-Shore, and asked about their outlooks for their businesses. The general consensus: They're ready for what the next year (and the years to come) have in store for them.

Finishing elements add cost, but they also add value. As print fights for its place in a digital world, we must find ways to make print more interesting and attractive. Print has a tactile advantage over books on screens: Print moves you without moving. Here are nine techniques for help enhance the "curb appeal" (to borrow a real-estate term) of your printed product.

In January, the Green Press Initiative (GPI)—a nonprofit that works with the book and newspaper publishing industries to conserve natural resources, announced its long-awaited Environmentally Responsible Publisher Certification (ERPC). Not unlike the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED certification for buildings, the GPI's program offers publishers tiers—bronze, silver and gold—for environmental achievement.

Since Julian Barnes big-upped Random House creative director Suzanne Dean in his Man Booker speech, a welter of stories on jacket design have popped up in the Sunday supplements. The articles have roughly followed Barnes' line that: "if the physical book is to resist the challenge of e-books, it has to look like something worth buying". This, quite frankly, is something of a hoary old media angle, dredging up an "e" versus "p" conflict which most trade publishers resolved about three years ago (academic publishers about 15 years ago). Besides, "cover" design is just as, and arguably more, crucial

Even as more readers switch to the convenience of e-books, publishers are giving old-fashioned print books a makeover. Publishers are putting more thought into books' aesthetics. Many new releases have design elements usually reserved for special occasions deckle edges, colored endpapers, high-quality paper and exquisite jackets that push the creative boundaries of bookmaking. If e-books are about ease and expedience, the publishers reason, then print books need to be about physical beauty and the pleasures of owning, not just reading. When people do beautiful books, theyre noticed more, said Robert S. Miller, the publisher of Workman Publishing. Its like

We are always just “that close” to putting paper publishing out of its misery and tossing words like “binding” into the same nostalgia heap where “film” and “camera ready graphics” live. Yet the success of books like "Reamde" tells a different story.  Their defiance of digital bliss has little or nothing to do with what’s more efficient or sustainable or convenient.

On America Recycles Day, FutureMark Paper Company rolled out the first high-recycled premium coated paper produced in North America especially for textbooks, cookbooks, children’s books and other picture books requiring premium print fidelity. Scholastic, an innovative children’s publishing, education and media company, is among the environmentally progressive companies using Future Book paper