World Book Day 2025 – Distribution Centres and Fruit Judging!
How was your World Book Day? Mine was fun, but not quite what I expected!
This year I was invited to join HarperCollins, the owners of Barrington Stoke (who publish my book REEK), as they opened their new distribution centre in Robroyston. And as I'm a geeky lad who loves the thought of touring enormous warehouses, I said yes, of course!
The new centre is VAST, able to send out 3 million books per week at peak. It's split into two main areas – palettes of books for bulk distribution, and then a hi-tech area that manages individual books in hopped moved around automatically by over two hundred shuttles.
It's hard to get your head around the scale of the place. There are around a hundred stacks of shelves, and each stack is 150m long and twelve palettes high. Fork lift trucks use guiding wires to navigate safely between them, stretching up in a way that looks quite terrifying.
Much of the distribution these days is in smaller amounts, so a separate area manages these. “This is the expensive bit” says Gordon, the Supply Chain Managing Director. Inside that black cube are two hundred automated shuttles fetching and storing over a hundred thousand hoppers of loose books. When boxes come in, the operator unpacks them, scans them, puts them into a hopper … and away they go. When they need to be shipped, the shuttles fetch the hoppers for packers to put them into their delivery boxes.
I had a go myself! I was GREAT. Except I put my books in the wrong box and the automated weighing system scolded me.
I had a brilliant day. I was the geeky kid at the front of the tour asking the guide questions non-stop. Thank you so much to Barrington Stoke and HarperCollins for inviting me along!
And then the next day there was some rather more normal World Book Day activies at the lovely Stockbridge Primary School, chatting Space Pirate Bears with the younger pupils and all things sci-fi (including I Am Wolf and REEK) with the older ones. And the greatest honour of all – judging the "Fruit and Veg Carved Into Literary Characters" competition. Happy World Book Day, everyone!
