DID YOU KNOW the latest Brooklyn sell-offs will take total Watchtower earnings to $804 MILLION since 2004?

by cedars 73 Replies latest jw friends

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  factfinder

  Thanks to Atlantis. Petra, and Vulcan we have available form s-15 Watchtower Publications list March 2013. This is for the US branch only which covers publications in some 380 languages of the more than 600 languages the society prints in.

  It would be a major task but if anyone was so inclined they could count the number of different items available from Wallkill and it will provide a good idea (though not complete) of how many titles the society now publishes. I'm curious but with the small print and my eyes I am not attempting it. The Germany branch stocks over 8,000 items and Wallkill has more.

  It is true the Society is printing fewer magazine pages. But it is also true they are producing literature,videos, etc in more languages, thus more titles each year. Total printing of magazines, books, Bibles, brochures, booklets, tracts and invitations for the memorial and conventions, plus kn#38, could reach close to 3 billion copies printed during the 2013 calendar (not service) year!

  While magazine page count has been reduced (except for the study w and simplified language editions) this will prove to be an extremely busy year for the societies printeries!
• 

  factfinder

  Thank you for the statistics Cedars and Eldenno!
• 

  cedars

  factfinder

  While magazine page count has been reduced (except for the study w and simplified language editions) this will prove to be an extremely busy year for the societies printeries!

  Firstly, the simplified English version is not an "edition." For printing/circulation purposes it is considered as just another language, included in the circulation figures.

  Secondly, I fail to see how this will prove to be an "extremely busy year for the societies printeries" when we have established that magazine printing is down 39% since 2005. That is a heck of a reduction in printed output.

  As to Eldenno's above list, five of the new convention releases are tracts and one is a DVD. The only newly-released materials requiring any significant printing were two 32-page brochures and a book, which is fairly typical for convention releases. Eldenno was even desperate enough to include forms on his above list, such as the Theocratic Ministry School Review Answer Sheet. Again, we are not talking about an item that will challenge Wallkill's printing press unduly.

  On this thread Eldenno made the assertion that magazine printing has not reduced. I went away, did some research, and proved this claim to be false. He then asserted that there are more printed items available now than at any previous point in the Society's history, again without presenting any evidence. To prove or disprove this claim, you would not only need to compare literature desk sheets between 2005 and 2013, but also the amount of printing involved per item. For reasons that should hopefully be obvious, a larger number of available items does not necessarily mean a busier printing press, since (for example) a tract does not require as much printing as a book.

  If you or Eldenno want to do some research and show me some information I will gladly look into it. But I can do nothing with supposition and guesswork.

  Cedars
• 

  Jeffro

  Eldenno:

  Ofcourse i can... here a list for the last 10 yrs

  The list you provided is a distorted subset of releases to make it appear more things were produced in 2013.

  Many of the things listed for 2013 are mundane items that have in fact been printed in each of the years listed. Several are not printed items at all.

  The source of your list is a third-party website, which seems to be merely an extract of bootlegged publications.
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  joe134cd

  In my mind there are 3 things that are undeniable here. (1)they are cutting back(2)they are down sizeing(3)what ever has happend or is going on with all that cash flow, those in the know aint saying nothing. I was talking to a sister who is in the Brooklyn bethel at the moment,and I asked her directly if the society was in a bit of a financial tight spot. Although she hadn't heard anything from the top, the fact that she had knowledge about it, and was able to confirm that there were rumours going around about it, was very telling. I say the translation and simplification argument is just a hoax.
• 

  besty

  Not sure if the WTS publishes a number of full time personnel that they support financially

  Would be interesting to graph that number against the $ value and see what the correlation is.
• 

  besty

  @ eldenno - would be interested in your feedback on the recent Mormon move to online preaching and the relative sophistication of various religious websites
• 

  cedars

  My conversation with Eldenno has spawned a JWsurvey article. Here is a link for anyone interested... http://wp.me/p1TWXJ-RP

  Cedars
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  besty

  that was possibly not his intial objective :-)
• 

  factfinder

  joe134cd-

  I agree. Something is or has happened, starting with the decision to end personal magazine subscriptions, that has caused the cut-backs and downsizing. I wonder if we will ever find out what it was or is, but with the economy the way it's been it seems reasonable that donations have dropped off sharply over the past 10 years.

  cedars-

  I agree with you that magazine printing is reduced regarding page counts.

  But it is a lot of extra work to prepare the presses to print so many extra publications in the increasing number of languages. Presses must be shut down , fitted with plates, and started up again with each individual order. It does not matter what size it is in this regard, it could be a book, a tract, a brochure. The factories must print thousands of different print orders and they are on a tight deadline schedule to complete them and get them shipped out on time, just as a commercial printery would be.

  Yes, the presses are very fast, and the more signatures a book has the longer it takes to print them.

  But the setup and makeready for tracts, brochures or any publications in the hundreds of languages takes a lot of time.

  Once running the presses can produce literature fast, but the orders are for set runs in varying amounts in hundreds of languages. This slows things down.

  The 9 realeases on hand at this years conventions are unusual. Yes, 5 are tracts, but in hundreds of languages.

  Kingdom News #38 will be in over 400 languages simultaneously (or more) if we compare with kn#37 from 2006 and the society is printing in many more languages now than they were back then.

  The presses must be shut down and set up again with new sets of plates over and over for each print order and every language edition of any publication is a new order. Thus, thousands and thousands of print orders with varying print runs.

  Thus, the wts presses would be extra busy this year.

  I agree with you that there is a big reduction in magazine pages!