Pulping Fiction: Where Books go to Die

Most books do not get a happily ever after. 

That is the realisation I had while working at the Foire du livre de Bruxelles, Belgium’s biggest book fair. This year, it happened in March, and it was my second time working there.  On the last day of the fair, like all employees, I helped pack up the big stand, still full of stacks of unsold books. 

The year before, naively, I assumed these books were put in boxes just to be sent back to warehouses. But then I started questioning why people were not necessarily handling them with care, or sorting them by title, publisher, or collection. I overheard half-joking talks of “let’s put them in the cercueils”. Cercueil, the French word for coffin, is what my colleagues call the huge cardboard containers they use to pack the books. That is when it hit me: these books were not going back to warehouses. They were being sent to die. 

It may sound a bit dramatic, but that is exactly what happens.  The unsold books from the bigger stands are often sent to the pilon, a process known in French as pilonnage, or in English as book pulping. A quiet, industrial, relatively brutal end for stories that never got the chance to be read, and lines that never got the chance to be admired.

Once I realised what I was participating in, I felt sick. I had spent days surrounded by, and selling stories, characters, ideas, hours and hours of someone’s creative work. And during those last evenings of the fair,  I was helping bury them. So I made a mission to learn more about the process, to ask around, and to try and at least understand why this was all happening.

What I witnessed in Brussels is far from a local occurrence. Every year, millions of unsold books around the world are destroyed. It is hard to know how many books exactly, as there is a huge effort from the publishing industry to hide the scale of the waste. But in the U.S. alone, estimates hold that between 65 to 95 percent of returned books are destroyed. They are pulped, dissolved into a milky material. That pulp is either used to make yet more paper, which will then be used as toilet, or hygienic paper, or transformed into yet more books (this is the case of less than 1 percent of all pulped books), or simply sent to the landfill. This does not happen only in the US. In France, the volume of pulped books  represents around 140 million copies every year. 

There are different reasons why a specific book is sent to be pulped. “Partial pulping” of a book occurs when part of its stock is destroyed. This can be the result of a fault in fabrication, obsolete books, stock surplus, etc. “Total pulping” happens when a book becomes “unsellable”, meaning when an editor refuses to lower the public price, and the sale is doomed to fail. This happens namely for books that are linked to short-term news, failed commercial enterprises, or old editions replaced by newer editions of a book.

But the real question is, why does pilonnage exist in the first place? From the conversations I had with my colleagues, as well as what I could gather trying to scouter the internet for information, the answer is very predictable: money. Of course, money is the main concern. Producing, storing, and then selling books is an expensive cycle. The way the cycle works is that an author sells their book to a publisher, who sells the book to a distributor, who sells the book to a retailer, who sells it to a consumer. Book sales  are “final” only when the book is sold to a consumer. Until then, it can be sent back down the chain, and each party that returns it, be it the publisher, the retailer, etc. is reimbursed. This means unsold books are a financial liability.

The market’s giants, such as the company I was working for, own large warehouses in each of their regions of distribution where they store the books until they are ordered to be sold in libraries, at events, etc. For convenience purposes, these warehouses are thoroughly sorted, and each title belongs to a “case”. Concretely, this means that whenever a book is ordered by people who want to fill the aisles of libraries, book events, etc., a worker has to go take that book out of the case, put it in a box and send it where it was ordered. This already costs money. When a library wants to return a book, for whatever reason, the same process needs to happen in reverse. That is why returning books to these warehouses, when they are not in big enough quantity, is not financially durable for the companies. Putting back three copies of one book in its case is too time and energy-consuming to be worth the effort. The cost of storage depends on different factors, such as the quality of the place, the size, etc. Moreover, the longer books are kept in storage, the more money they cost. For mass-market paperbacks, for instance, the cost of storage outweighs any realistic resale value for publishers, because such books are already very cheap. Just the going back-and-forth between the storage facility and the aisle would quickly amount to more than the price of the book itself. But, books which are returned in big enough quantities are sometimes simply put back in their cases. This is also the case of books which are really expensive to produce, such as “beaux livres”. But this barely represents 4.5 percent of all returns. There are so many books returned to the publisher or distributors, not because they are not good, but because the book market is largely unpredictable, leading to a lot of production surplus. Publishers tend to print more books than they actually sell to avoid understocking. Of course, ideally, each book would find a home, a library, a school, or a workplace to be loved and enjoyed. But that is rarely the case. 

Pulping is the cheapest, and most immediate solution available to deal with the unsold stock since libraries are reimbursed for what they paid for, publishers do not have to pay someone to put the books back and store them, and the cycle continues. 

This pulping process very obviously raises economic and ecological questions, and made me, a book lover since I could read, reassess everything I thought I knew about books. I always naively thought books were directly ordered by librarians, carefully picked out and selected to find a loving owner that will enjoy its pages. But, it is mostly not about the love of language, creativity, or thought. It is really about money. And this was even more infuriating to me because unlike milk or cereal, it is not like books have an expiry date. They are supposed to be lasting products. They are supposed to be exchanged from person to person, they can pass down for generations. The words can be enjoyed as many times as wanted. And yet, one is forced to realise this is not the case anymore. Books are not a unique cultural good anymore. They are a product tailored to fast-selling. Pulping is thus deeply embedded in the ‘business model’ of books, which are treated like perishables. 

Financially, despite the fact that pulping is more economically viable than to return books, there is still a big waste. Indeed, the money that went into producing them, distributing them, storing them, just for the books to end up destroyed, never even used, seems wasted. The time and money that went into them, from the author to everyone in the book-life’s cycle, seems wasted. Large-scale pulping makes short-term sense to publishers operating on tight margins, but it reflects an unsustainable long-term business model. 

And then, of course, there is the environmental cost. Pulping may sound like recycling, and that is an excuse that a lot of companies hide behind, but it is definitely not clean. The process of pulping itself is polluting: it requires huge quantities of water, energy, and chemicals to actually break down printed paper and reconstitute it. And books which are laminated or bound with glue-heavy covers sometimes cannot be recycled at all and are incinerated or sent to landfill directly. On top of that, the whole lifecycle of a book, from deforestation to printing, transport, storage and destruction, leaves an insane carbon footprint, for nothing. Millions of trees cut down every year, for nothing. Millions of trees replanted at the cost of biodiversity every year, for nothing. Per year, the true face of the book market in France only is more than 25000 tons of waste. 

One thing all my colleagues, despite all being united by our love for books and literature, agreed on is that there is not much to do, other than to reinvent the entire market. Indeed, going against book pulping would mean questioning the publishing world’s  most basic assumptions. Why do publishers need to bet on excess rather than precision? Why is it more viable to destroy a book than to donate it, or even just store it a little longer?

And I really want to say, why not try and change? There are already different initiatives which try to reduce pulping and give unsold books a second life. Organisations try to recuperate them and donate them to NGOs, schools, or resell them at a very low price. Some publishing companies also try to see things differently and weigh the cost-benefit: choosing to lose a little money to make the people who could not buy the books enjoy them anyway. Some organisations also focus on documenting what is happening because few people know about it, and pushing for more transparency in publishing supply chains could also make a change.

But we, as consumers and readers, are also part of this system. Every time we treat books as disposable, through overconsumption, impulse buying, or massive online hauls, we feed the machine. BookTok  and YouTube book hauls featuring 40 unread books may seem harmless, but they contribute to the same overproduction cycle. There is, also in the book market, a chase to an everlasting “always more”. More novelties, more books, more divertissement. 

Perhaps we should start listening to people who ask us to support independent publishers and bookstores that print on demand or embrace slow publishing. Perhaps we should emphasise sending, sharing and cherishing books instead of treating them as commodities. And perhaps most importantly, we should keep talking about pilon, not letting this invisible graveyard stay hidden under layers of hypocrisy. 

Pulping, no matter how absurd it sounds, is not a mistake, it is a feature of how publishing is currently set up. But it does not have to be. Because once you know about it, once you’ve packed those boxes yourself, it is really hard to go back to browsing any shelf the same way. The fairytale of the book’s status, mystique and importance shatters, leaving only a stripped, capitalistic reality. We may not be able to stop the pulping machines directly, but we can choose to feed the cercueils less.