ECO-FRIENDLY FONTS SAVE TREES

It’s been wisdom in the publishing world for many years that, given the price of a paperback only varies by a pound or two between a thin volume and a chunky tome, readers perceive bigger books as better value, and so titles with a lower than average word count have sometimes been printed with excessively large fonts and copious amounts of blank space to make them more commercial.

But with eco-consciousness, plus rising costs of paper, ink and transport costs, in 2015 HarperCollins US began thinking differently. Designers at Zondervan Bibles, HC’s Christian publishing division, began experimenting with different fonts and page layouts, realising that reducing the number of pages in each book slightly could cumulatively make a significant difference. The project culminated in the design of a new type face, NIV Compact Print, which in 2017 alone saved 100 million pages in producing various editions of the Bible.

Since then HarperCollins has expanded the initiative throughout its many other imprints, with the aim being to retain clarity of reading so much so that customers don’t even notice a difference – yet being able to add an extra sentence or so per page can really pay off, both for the balance sheet and the environment. The company notes that the new approach, which was first tested by creating 50 different versions of a 600-page book with a variety of fonts, has now settled to using a core list of 15 preferred ‘eco-friendly’ fonts suitable for a wide range of genres. This has in the last three years reduced the company’s print output by around a quarter of a billion pages, or over 5,600 trees. So if you’ve noticed books getting a little more svelte, but still taking just as long to read, now you know why. GD