Beautiful Assembly Halls and Paperback Bibles

by believingxjw 18 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  OnTheWayOut

  I imagine the paperback Bibles came out when they were entirely abandoning hardcover and they knew they wouldn't last. They hoped JW's would hold onto their well-crafted deluxe Bibles with the gold edges for years, caring even better for them and would offer the cheap paperbacks in recruiting work. Well, that lasted only so long and even the JW's good quality books are needing repairs. I am sure they simply saw how many Bibles went out and weren't counted as "placements" so they figured it was time to make better Bibles.

  All business decisions, nothing so difficult.
• 

  JWoods

  I left about the time that the traditional printing and binding was ending - the late 1970s.

  When I see a WT product now, I am shocked at the low quality compared to the old letterpress days.
• 

  DaCheech

  they only changed back to hardbound because it was costlier to replace tons of them with very little contributions
• 

  steve2

  Kingdom Halls in New Zealand are anything but beautiful. Anyone who has seen the Kingdom Halls in Shannon, Rotorua, Wanganui and especially Palmerston North will know what I mean. The kingdom hall in the latter city is painted with the dreariest and darkest colours imaginable - it looks as gloomy and uniniviting as a typical JW elder judicial committee. I wish I had a scanner.
• 

  WTWizard

  The A$$embly Hell is designed to create a good first impression. You are impressed with the landscaping, the building appearance, the "marble" tile (of course that requires strict rules in taking care of it, unlike the government buildings with similar marble tiles), the carpets, seating, and everything else. Then they hound endlessly for donations for this superficial "beauty"--hoping to more than make back what they put in for the surface appearance of quality.

  However, if you look beneath the surface, the seats are crap. They create the illusion of durability with strict rules--no ink pens allowed, and obviously no jumping on the seats as in a worldly venue. The marble tile is nowhere near the quality of the same tiles in worldly places. I have seen the landscape a few years later, and it is not pretty. Dead trees, flowers that look like they are abused and ratty, fake plants, and trim that comes off if you so much as look at it wrong are normal. Yet, when this does happen, the congregations are invariably blamed and crackdowns on the rules are put out to create the illusion of excellent quality. Fact is, the Christmas lights I have been buying this summer to replace the Everstar Crap Merchandise ones are of higher quality than anything you might find at the a$$embly hell.
• 

  sabastious

  The NWTs don't pull in profit, the assembly halls do. Riddle solved

  -Sab
• 

  factfinder

  I liked it best when the Society was producing burst-bound books. These held together great and looked nice. But the new equipment in Wallkill produces perfect bound books- even the hardcover ones are perfect bound. True- perfect binding has greatly improved over the years, but the burst binding method was the best.

  The switch to paperbacks in 1998 was due to very high shipping costs. The bans were being removed against the Witnesses in country after country, in Eastern Europe and in Africa. So demand for books was going way up in these lands now that the brothers had the freedom to place them in the ministry. But the donations from these countries was very low, not covering the cost of shipping the books there. So the society began experimenting with paperback books, to test quality, endurance etc. They felt satisfied and began producing paperback Knowledge books. They could print , bind and ship pb books at half the cost of hc books, solving the problem of covering the costs of shipping to those poorer lands. But the WT felt it would not be fair to give those brothers pb books while giving the other brothers hc ones, so decided to switch more and more books to paperback at a tremendous cost savings. Later, even larger books were switched to pb, and finally the Bibles. ( Most Bibles sold at bookstores are paperback).

  But if Jehovah is backing and blessing the organization, as they always claim he is, why are the contributions so low they have to keep switching more and more books to paperback, print far fewer copies of the magazines, and downsize their facilities?

  The answer is obvious!
• 

  Scully

  Paperback bibles won't last as long as hardbound ones.

  All the better to conceal the WTS revisions from one edition to the next.
• 

  Pistoff

  The paperback (you must mean softcover) format fits the doctrine: DISPOSABLE, ready to discard in 5 years tops.