Dead tree supply chain issues?

Hi all,
Are dead tree publishers still having supply chain issues to get products on the shelf? Here in Canada it seems like C7 can't get their wfrp 4e books to the stores. Other publishers seem to be having issues as well.
Just wondering what's going on.
Thanks

I'd venture to guess since 90& of dead tree books seem to be printed in China these days, that backlog of shipping from China to NA let alone Europe is causing the shortages/logjam of products getting to customers.

I watched some Youtube vid about shipping from China to North America, specifically the port of LA. And why many of the transports don't travel at their max speed (saves of fuel $) but also just how long they stack up and sit at anchor waiting for their turn to actually dock and unload their cargo. Was surprising and depressing.


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It's not just publishers. One of the buildings I work at needs a new motor for one of the loading dock doors. When they went to put in an order, they were told it would take up to six months because of the supply chain issues caused by the pandemic.

urbwar said:

It's not just publishers. One of the buildings I work at needs a new motor for one of the loading dock doors. When they went to put in an order, they were told it would take up to six months because of the supply chain issues caused by the pandemic.

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With most countries having lifted restrictions months ago, I wonder how much longer it will take the world to get back on track.

Neon said:

With most countries having lifted restrictions months ago, I wonder how much longer it will take the world to get back on track.

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At least another year or two. Even if most governments have lifted restrictions, some industries still work to higher safety standards. And COVID also hasn't gone away, it's still around; a case can still easily still cripple a team by needing folk to stay away from work to stop it spreading.

China's "zero COVID" plan especially is going to have a huge impact; their strategy all along hasn't been to get back to a state of "looking like the world-that-was ASAP" like a lot of western countries, but to get to a state where they had things actually under control and could work in what the world would look like now. That's part of why, for example, they will shut down an area at just one case; it'll cost them now, but they'll be able to make it up in future.

Frankly I think the days of cheap and fast international shipping are over, and we were just lucky to have such a relatively calm period between about the 1950's and 2020. The supply chain industry was as profitable as it was due to eliminating as much slack in the system as possible. And that's great assuming business as usual, but when there's a big interruption like COVID, it leaves you without the capacity to catch up.

Ladybird said:

At least another year or two. Even if most governments have lifted restrictions, some industries still work to higher safety standards. And COVID also hasn't gone away, it's still around; a case can still easily still cripple a team by needing folk to stay away from work to stop it spreading.

China's "zero COVID" plan especially is going to have a huge impact; their strategy all along hasn't been to get back to a state of "looking like the world-that-was ASAP" like a lot of western countries, but to get to a state where they had things actually under control and could work in what the world would look like now. That's part of why, for example, they will shut down an area at just one case; it'll cost them now, but they'll be able to make it up in future.

Frankly I think the days of cheap and fast international shipping are over, and we were just lucky to have such a relatively calm period between about the 1950's and 2020. The supply chain industry was as profitable as it was due to eliminating as much slack in the system as possible. And that's great assuming business as usual, but when there's a big interruption like COVID, it leaves you without the capacity to catch up.

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I think the US is looking to break it's reliance on China but it's extremely hard. It's larger than all of its low wage competitors, more skilled and immensely more integrated. I have a friend who does marketing products for a variety of companies. No one else in the low wages countries can truly compete on all but the simplest stitched items. They compete mostly because of a desire to diversify away from China. China like every other country in the world has a number of challenges amplified by it's size. Demographics are looking horrible longer term. Zero Covid at this point seems questionable of how much longer they can put it off. They have an huge housing/debt crisis going on.

I was talking about this with a store owner while I was shopping the other day. She does half her sales in person, and half online, and has traditionally put out a print catalog once a year (it is a specialty non-game-related store). She said that the price to print the catalog has doubled in the past couple of years, so she hasn't been able to make a new one - or even print extra copies of the old one - in quite some time.

Neon said:

Hi all,
Are dead tree publishers still having supply chain issues to get products on the shelf? Here in Canada it seems like C7 can't get their wfrp 4e books to the stores. Other publishers seem to be having issues as well.
Just wondering what's going on.
Thanks

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A week ago I asked Modiphius if they planned to do a reprint of the Kull of Atlantis book, here's the answer I got:

"The cost of printing has risen prohibitively so of late and so we are waiting for an improvement before moving forward with another print run"

PoD has really taken off, obviously. It can be a bit pricy, particularly if you want something of better quality. Sometimes you get a book that looks like it was done by some dodgy guy with an inkjet in his garage. But for those of us who don't live in America, shipping is extortionate and takes forever, and it may well be worth paying a bit extra to get a decent PoD book done locally.

In the UK I've used Lulu for POD, same as Design Mechanism use. I've also used Aeon games for TDM stuff as well as they provide the pdf quickly whereas getting one from TDM if using Lulu involves mailing TDM with the recipt info.

The reality is that it'll likely be years, before things are back to something resembling pre-COVID situations. If we get there at all.

When COVID happened, factories and businesses around the world effectively got shut down or scaled down for months on end. What that led to was a build-up of a backlog of production. Many factories often operate at around 80% capacity, in order to have some form of flexibility. COVID combined with the increased demand for a wide variety of products effectively eliminated this surplus capacity for most factories. So that has resulted in extended lead times on a lot of things. The increased demand for products have led to an increased demand for transport, and that has happened while you've had a reduction in workforce and production capacity due to Covid. This has meant bottlenecks on getting ships loaded and unloaded, as well as getting things transported on land. This has created logistical problems with ships and containers not being where they have been needed at a given time, which has caused more delays.
On top of all of this shit, you can then add the various random crap, which created problems for supply chains around the world. I.e. the ship that ran aground in the Suez Canal and closed it for use for 6 days, and created delays. Just to give you an idea of what we are talking about, you had at least 369 ships waiting to transit through the Suez Canal at that point. I've no idea of how long it took to get the transit time through the canal normalized again. But it forced many ships to sail around Africa, instead of having to wait to be able to get through the Suez. Then you've had some manufacturers experience accidents, which has created massive lead time extensions. One chip manufacturer, that had a monopoly on a particular type of chip, had the factory burn down. Manufacturing got shot down until the factory could be rebuild. Then the Russia/Ukraine thing happened, which has effectively disrupted airline routes, as Russian and Ukrainian airspace has effectively become blocked off to most airlines. It's also created supply problems with regards to gas, oil, and various types of basic food stuff that normally comes out of the Ukraine. This has led to a massive jump in inflation.

So basically the demand for a shitload of things got to be higher than the supply capacity, in some situations all the way back to the companies digging in the ground for rare earths and minerals. You got bottlenecks and logistics problems, and random shit throwing spanners in the works of the world markets. And the end result is that transport costs have been driven up by absurd amounts, and production costs in various places are similarly being driven up further by a mismatch between the demand and availability of various products. So printing a bunch of RPG books are likely to have become more expensive, and transport of them has increased by a LOT. Personally I'm working in the electronics business, and I've had several suppliers increase their prices by 15-20%, and that's before we look at the cost of shipping, which as also gone up significantly. The good news, however, is that things are improving. As prices on everything has gone up, demand is decreasing, and that will reduce the pressure on the transport sector, which in turn should lead to lower prices. But we are not there yet.

It makes me wonder if we'll eventually see a reversion to less expensive formats for RPG books (i.e. more softcover, B&W, and so on, rather than all of these full color hardbacks).

I understand that the higher production value books sell better, but at a certain point, that advantage will be outweighed by the negatives of higher costs and excessive lead times.

Dyrnwyn said:

It makes me wonder if we'll eventually see a reversion to less expensive formats for RPG books (i.e. more softcover, B&W, and so on, rather than all of these full color hardbacks).

I understand that the higher production value books sell better, but at a certain point, that advantage will be outweighed by the negatives of higher costs and excessive lead times.

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I seriously doubt it. Instead, we'll just see what we've already been seeing, the physical option dropped altogether in favor of PDF priced at the point the hardcover would have been.

Gabriel said:

I seriously doubt it. Instead, we'll just see what we've already been seeing, the physical option dropped altogether in favor of PDF priced at the point the hardcover would have been.

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I see that as likely, unfortunately. Unfortunate to me not so much from the price point as the experience of use.

The problems I have with PDFs are: portability; and speed of reference. PDFs can alleviate these issues, but as long as PDF versions are just electronic versions of the print books this won't happen.

Portability:

I like to read RPGs. In an easy chair, on the sofa, in bed, waiting in the car in a parking lot - not only in front of my computer. Or I'll take the book to use at an in-person game at someone else's home, or even at my home but at the dinner table instead of the computer desk. Which means I'd be reading a PDF on a smaller screen than my desktop monitor.

The standard two-column format is fine if you can see the whole page at once, but it's very inconvenient to start at the top left of a page then scroll down then scroll back up and then scroll back down again and maybe scroll back to read the side text box all on the same page and then on to the next page for hundreds of pages. And most tables involve either scrolling up and down and over a lot or are too small to be legible.

So I will get supplements or even the occasional core book if it's something I might just flip through, but if it's something I'm actually going to read enough to use I definitely want a physical version.

A few publishers will offer alternate electronic formats (I remember Eclipse Phase, at least first edition, had an epub version), but most just convert the physical print into a PDF file.

Speed of Reference:

I find it much faster to flip through the pages of a book than to scroll through a PDF to find something. Maybe I could scroll faster on a more powerful computer, but then see 'portability' above. But I find it easier to just riff through the pages until I spot a heading or chart or illustration that I remember is close to the specific paragraph I'm looking for.

With a printed book, all of the 'heavy lifting' of the page is already done. With a graphics-heavy PDF (illustrations, page background, artsy borders) sometimes my PDF reader takes a bit of time to load and establish these different elements each page. Even though it doesn't take very long at all for an individual page, if I'm flipping through multiple pages to find something then many pages are missing elements (or even blank) until I wait for the page to load, which over a few hundred pages takes up some time. This might be a technical thing due to my specific computer set-up, but I don't think I'm the only one with this issue.

Word-searching in a PDF is great if the word isn't commonly used, but it doesn't help find a specific rule if the word is used a lot. And hyperlinked contents and indexes are great when they're complete enough, but even then it can be annoying to get to the index by jumping down to the end of the file and then paging up past the back cover, inside cover, in-house ads, and sample character sheet. And bookmarks are great on the desktop monitor where I have enough electronic real estate to have the bookmark panel open and still be able to read the actual PDF pages, but on a smaller screen it involves opening and closing the panel - not a huge thing, but still an annoyance.

So for me, PDFs of games are fine in one specific circumstance: when I'm sitting in front of my desktop computer. But if I want to use the book anywhere else, it becomes annoying enough that I'd rather just get the physical book, so much so that I mostly base my gaming decisions on what I have or can get physically.

I know I'm maybe being a bit unreasonable expecting an electronic edition to duplicate the experience of the print edition instead of providing an equally satisfying but different experience. But if the electronic edition is just the print edition in electronic format then that's what the publisher is telling me to expect, I think.

What would help is a standard practice for publishers to provide PDF or especially alternate electronic formats like epub that are specifically designed to be read on smaller tablets or even phones - fewer purely formatting graphics, no columns, try to avoid larger tables/charts. Maybe do a pure text book with the rules and settings for reading and reference during play and a separate art book with the illustrations to provide visual information about the setting.

Scion 2nd edition and Aberrant 2nd edition both use about the same ruleset, and both are something I'm interested in playing. But for whatever reason my local game shop only has Scion on the shelves, and Aberrant requires cross-referencing between the core book and the Aberrant supplement to play. I have both in PDF, but I've read a lot more of Scion and am readier to run/play Scion over Aberrant.

Gabriel said:

I seriously doubt it. Instead, we'll just see what we've already been seeing, the physical option dropped altogether in favor of PDF priced at the point the hardcover would have been.

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I think that's probably most likely, yeah. Maybe one or two publishers will try for the cheaper print options as an experiment.