I don't have experience in this area, but I dislike when people think this way in general, because it leads to comments like "oh, that's just standard language", and "no one else actually reads it all, I've never had that question before" in rather important contracts.

I often feel like I am signing my life away unnecessarily due to "standard contracts" that are highly asymmetrical, yet no one else cares or pushes back. So, I have to grant overreaching rights to the other party and just trust that they won't actually exercise it, for the sake of getting a deal done.

To me the paper approval seems like an odd request, but not logistically unreasonable. If they can communicate the content to the print operation, they can surely communicate a paper specification. Presumably they already do this for the paper size. More importantly, it doesn't matter. He did the deal because they agreed to his terms, whatever they were. That is them deciding that it's worth accommodating his parameters. If they thought they were logistically infeasible, they would have declined the deal, and both parties would be better off.

Edit: Ah, this is a book about design. That makes the paper approval request pretty reasonable, especially considering he had image bleed issues with the cheap paper.