In early January, a large shipping vessel from Taiwan en-route to New York, was stalled in the mid-Atlantic by port congestion. Causing 89 damaged containers and another 60 containers to go overboard, the incident was contributed by extreme weather conditions.
It was reported that there were no injuries on board.
Supply Chain Crisis
The growing e-commerce has put additional pressure on the carriers, ports, and intermodal transport providers. The supply chain crisis was caused by backlogs across major supply chain hubs in 2021 and was predicted that it would almost be likely to continue into 2022, affecting trade flows globally.
Consequently, due to the Coronavirus pandemic and Brexit, the global supply chain and shipments have drastically slowed down causing a worldwide shortage and affecting the consumer patterns. Shipping costs have soared, continued delays and empty shipping containers across the world are all in the wrong place.
However, one of the main causes of the economic slowdown are from workers either becoming sick due to COVID-19 or being made to quarantine, causing a lot of restrictions affecting the availability of staff.
Publishing
Inside the damaged and lost containers were cookbooks which were scheduled for release this Spring by New Orleans chef Mason Hereford, Turkey and the Wolf and Dinner in One by the Melissa Clark, New York Times columnist.
Former present, Donald Trump couldn’t get enough suppliers to produce his book “Our Journey Together”, because of ongoing supply-chain disruption. Spoken on a Wednesday episode of Dobb’s podcast, “The Great America Show”, he was told by his book’s printer, “We can’t get paper. We can’t get ink. We can’t get glue. We can’t get leather for the covers.”
The loss of books has added to the strain COVID-19 already inflicted on the publishing industry. In addition to that, it has further put pressure on the supply issues, global labour and paper shortage, whilst demand continues to rise. In 2021, the demand for books went up 8.9% compared with 2022, which was already up 8.2% compared with 2019, a 0.7% incline.
Some publishers have been made to, more than once, push back their release dates, which is leading to the “domino effect”. This is causing a lot of interference with pre-order campaigns and events.
Chief executive for the Hachette Book Group, David Shelley, said in December 2021 that supply chain problems were causing “most extreme” challenges that he had ever seen in his 24 years of publishing.
