Cedars-
The increase of languages the society prints literature in since 2005 is over 200! Yes, it takes a great amount of time to produce publications in that many languages.
Remember, besides the magazines the society prints about 100 million Bibles and books, 200 million brochures and booklets and 400 million tracts, not to mention hundreds of millions of other items, each in scores if not hundreds of languages.
Downtime counts because they have a strict deadline for publications (especially the magazines) to be shipped out to the 111,000 congregations on time so that witnesses in 239 lands can study them the same week. Most if not all of the publications are now being printed simultaneously- we have no idea of how much time, effort, and work is involved in that.
No other printing company on earth prints in anywhere near as many languages as Watchtower.
RR Donnelley & Sons is the largest commercial printer in the world. They print in 32 languages.
The reduction in magazine pages allows the magazines to be printed faster once the presses are set up and running, but the work involved in translating and preparing the publications by the more than 3,000 volunteer translators in over 200 countries, takes time.
Again, you are focusing only on magazine production (which according to the figures you provide came to over 1.2 biillion copies last year). I agree that the pages printed in the magazines is down.
But that does not mean there is less work going through the factories as I mentioned in my post. More language editions of any publications requires more time and work. In 2011 the society was translating and preparing literature in 500 languages. Now it is over 600 languages. Every publication they come out with requires more translation work, thus more seperate, individual print orders than ever before. Again, it takes extra time and preperation to get these items produced.
