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Comment by dfc | Hacker News Reader

We recently ordered four or five Oreilly Hadoop books from amazon and the printing was horrible. The fonts look terrible and simple things like grey backgrounds are not uniform. The book is still legible but the printing gets distracting at times. I thought it was an indication that Oreilly had lowered there standards.

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I have a copy of Programming Robots with ROS in front of me which I was on the verge of sending back to Amazon. The text printing is fuzzy and images have noticeable banding. You can't read text in the screenshots it's so bad. It's like the book was printed in draft mode. I bought it a month ago.

Here's an example: https://imgur.com/X6KwHNm and another: https://imgur.com/nTflKSL

I bought it on sale, but this retails at £40. That's not acceptable. I've bought full colour textbooks with photo quality prints for the same price.

I had a look at a previous purchase, Fluent Python, and it's similar but not as bad. The animal icons (e.g. the ravens with little facts next to them) are still quite poorly printed. I bought that about 6 months ago.

Looking further back in time, I've got some pocket guides to Python and C. It could be a placebo - maybe the paper just feels nicer over time. The printing also looks better, but there aren't any big ink-dense graphics to give a fair comparison:

https://imgur.com/koeIpLO

The first two I bought from Amazon, the latter I bought from Blackwells, but that was years ago. The seller was just Amazon, not a 3rd party.

I uploaded examples from three of the four books:

http://imgur.com/a/SKEVT

It is sad because this is not how my older Oreilly books are printed.

We generally avoid POD. Quality doesn't always meet our standards, and we're picky.

As an author and publisher using Lightning source, I would argue that our print on demand books are equal to those of any major publisher and better than many I pull off shelves in bricks and mortar dealers.

Do you remember who the Seller was? Did it say "Oreilly"? If yes, then this is quite disturbing. How will anyone know the legitimacy of a Seller?

I think Amazon should start doing "Verified Sellers" like Twitter does with it's "Verified Accounts".

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