I Speak For The Trees...

Some books have beautiful, intricately-made papers that house its words.  This is not exactly the case for my book. It was released in 2013, and is about as commercial as they come.  And extremely boring, it seems, in terms of paper.  According to some investigating I did, the type of paper used in the book publishing industry is literally just called "book paper."  Yeah.  No surprises there.  It is also sometimes referred to as publishing paper, but I wouldn't say that's too much more of an interesting name.

I cannot seem to find out whether there is a specific type of tree whose pulp is used to create this paper, but it does have a lot of other specifications to it that make it ideal for its usage in published novels, such as its very exactly calculated weight.  For casual reading, the paper needs to be fairly lightweight for ease of use, but still needs to be tough enough to withstand everyday jostling and not tear too easily.  This paper can be colored, but in Champion, it is simply the default white seen in nearly all commercial novels.  It is completely blemish-free, without any watermarks or other designs.  The company seems to have done absolutely nothing to differentiate this book from others aside from the obvious content differences.

However, that is simply the nature of this type of book.  This is a book that has been highly anticipated, being the conclusion to a trilogy, so it was expected to sell a great deal of copies.  Therefore, the focus is put more on the efficient manufacturing of the books, rather than giving them any painstaking artistic touches such as expensive paper with intricate detailing.  Though, my particular book does have the benefit of having more detailed typographic design than most.  So, really, the plain paper helps to display that aspect of it.

Upon doing research on paper, I realized that most people know very little about paper at all.  Beyond the everyday types, information on paper really is not common knowledge.  It's just not something that we focus on in our culture.  Most people probably paper multiple times a day, yet could not tell you how it is made using any details other than that it comes from trees.  So I figured I'd put this short video here that shows the paper-making process: