TOP 30 BOOK MANUFACTURERS — CLIMBING THE STACKS

Over the last year, can you identify any major changes in the book manufacturing market, as well as one or two major challenges facing your company? How is your firm responding?

John Edwards: We are seeing intense price pressure in the marketplace, a tight paper market and rising healthcare costs. And there is some concern with too much capacity and the seasonal nature of the business. The peaks and valleys are much bigger than they used to be. We are almost getting to be like the toy business where everything seems to happen toward the end of the year. Business is up and down a lot more, so we have a lot more variation of volume coming in, [which is] much harder to predict. For example, our sheetfed presses will be buried, our web presses will be empty and two weeks later it will be the opposite. So, today we are required to create a more flexible workforce to react to where the volume is, which is not a bad thing.