It's an informative post, and you should read it all. She explains which sorts of new books won't receive an exemption and what that will mean to the consumer:
"Touch and feel" books have fabrics or laminated components. Some books have parts that come apart. Some novelty books have vinyl, which is known to contain lead. I expect novelty books will disappear from the marketplace. Stapled and spiral bound books are certainly going to disappear from the market place too. Older books have already started to disappear from places like Amazon. The costs for testing and other regulatory requirements make it to expensive to make these books available at an affordable price.
Here's something else that I think is going to disappear or be reduced to a sliver of the market and be priced out of our reach at that- books illustrated with anything other than a straightforward 4 color or CMYK printing. It simply won't be cost effective unless the publishing company can be very sure of large enough sales at high enough prices to justify the additional testing that will be required. The children's book world just got a lot duller.
Remember The Rainbow Fish? I could be wrong, but I am not sure this is a book that a publisher would risk in today's legal climate and with the restrictions on anything other than 4 color printing just issued by the CPSC.
Looking over this site which explains when spot color processing might be desired, I find the following recommendations for when to use spot colors:
# Publication needs a color that cannot be accurately reproduced with CMYK inks, such as precise color matching of a corporate or logo color.
# Printing a specific color over multiple pages that requires page to page color consistency.
# Printing over a large area, such as a poster (spot color inks may provide more even coverage).
# Need more vibrant colors or more exacting color matching than what CMYK inks produce.
# Project requires special effects such as metallic or fluorescent spot inks.
So posters are going to go up in price, and with the corresponding rise in price, sales will go down, and the most efficient response will be to cut back on posters where sales are too low to justify the cost of testing. I expect Miley Cyrus and Disney Princess posters are safe, but posters that would appeal to my family are probably priced out of the market.
The 'special effects such as metallic spot inks' sounds like The Rainbow Fish to me. But it also sounds like a number of picture books we have that are touched with a glowing gold to give them the look of an illuminated manuscript; The Exodus, by Brian Wildsmith, for example (he has a similarly illustrated book about the biblical Joseph, and one about Jesus). I've not seen the other two, but The Exodus is a beautiful book, touched with gold, luminous.
Sometimes printers use both processes together- and, again, these books would require third party testing by the manufacturer and/or importer as I understand this ruling, and publishers are likely to decide it's just not worth the paperwork, not worth the legal hassle and expense:
# Publication with full-color photographs must also incorporate specific spot colors that cannot be created with CMYK inks (such as logo color).
# Need to enhance or increase intensity of (bump up) a specific process color by adding a spot color ink to it (a 5th plate for the spot color used in this manner is called a bump plate).
Sometimes varnish is used, and this is also considered, in the printing world, to be a fifth color, which I believe the CPSC would require additional testing for:
Spot varnishing is a special effect that puts varnish only on specific areas of a printed piece. Use spot varnish to make a photograph pop off the page, highlight drop caps, or to create texture and subtle images on the page.
That reminds me of another book we own: Lest We Forget: The Passage from Africa to Slavery and Emancipation: A Three-Dimensional Interactive Book with Photographs and Documents from the Black Holocaust Exhibit by Velma Maia Thomas
I bought this one from a black-owned business at a home-school fair in Washington, I believe, several years ago (it was published in 1997). What makes me think this book might be one that would require expensive additional testing to be published today is some of the 3-D features, in addition to some eye-popping illustrations. There is one page in particular that stands out to me- it is a design of a slave ship with a lift the flap feature taking you deeper into the layers of the ship. As you come to the slave berths, showing the slaves stacked like cordwood, chained to their wooden platforms about as spacious as a coffin, the bodies of this human cargo are raised from the page.
I still remember the chill I got at the woman's booth when she showed me this page, ran her fingers over the raised images and she said, "these are the bodies of my ancestors."
Okay, true confession: I am annoyingly literal minded at times, and at the same time as one part of me got goose-bumps and a lump in my throat, the other part of me more pragmatically thought, "Well, actually, that's an appeal to emotion and in reality that's nothing more than a printed page with some textured images on it, and it's not anybody's ancestor, but still, it's a nice effect."
And I bought the book.
This book is a very attractive book, but I fear all the things that make it special, the raised images, the fold out attachments, some of the eye-popping colors, and in other places more subtle background images make it the sort of book that would be too much trouble to create for the 12 and under market today, thanks to the CPSIA.
And there are still more reasons to use spot-colouring in books:
# For clearer, more vibrant, photo-realistic colors than can be acheived with 4 color (CMYK) printing alone.
# To get more pure violets, greens and oranges than CMYK alone.
The children's book world, it seems to me, will lose some vibrancy, and our children will not be better off for it.
I don't want to be selfish, however, it's not all about books, after all, hard as that is for me to believe.=) In some good news, pretty much all textiles have been exempted by the latest ruling, so Sarah and a number of other artisans just might be back in business. Pin It
