Our BOOK vs. the global supply chain

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 Live event info and tickets here. Pre-order the Planet Money book and get a free gift . /

You can listen to Our BOOK vs. the global supply chain online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Our BOOK vs. the global supply chain is an episode from Planet Money by NPR.

This episode is 46:30 long.

This episode was published on Mar 26, 2026.

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