Yes, our local grocery has signs about shortages all over the store--and paper goods are among them.
Maybe a severe and sustained paper shortage will finally kill the horribly wasteful publishing standard of tearing off mass market paperback covers and getting full credit for a return while tossing out the books themselves (and not necessarily recycling the paper), and of overprinting and stuffing too many copies into physical bookstores and then accepting full-copy returns. Return credit became a thing in the Depression, to coax bookstores to bring in stock. It's a lousy industry paradigm that ought to die.
Our indie trade paperbacks that are returnable through Ingram, for instance, would be full-copy returns, but a trade paperback is likely to come back in shopworn, unsaleable condition. Returned hardcovers are routinely resold as bargain books and return to the very same bookstores at much lower prices, but they manage to stay in decent physical shape after all that back and forth.
POD is a much saner way of printing books, but customers rule, and if they want it NOW, publishers and bookstores will do everything they can to make it happen--short of actually printing the book for them at the store. That hasn't really worked out even though some people in the industry want it to. I think it has to do with lacking the magic.
