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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

What’s wrong with books printed on demand?

Paper and ink quality. Quality of the binding.

This isn't so much a "all print on demand suffers from quality issues" but rather "the quality of the print on demand services is often an exercise in cost cutting."

I am certain that there are POD material that are as good as the traditional book print (and there are certainly non POD that employ similar cost cutting), but rather that in general, there is more investment in quality on the larger runs of a paperback book.

If you’re buying the book for the content not as an art item or for archiving I’m sure it’s fine.

They're also not edited to fit the page well, nor with much care for typography or anything else. "Rivers" all over the place, weird page breaks, various formatting errors commonly creeping in. Page numbers in e.g. an index may not match the page numbers in the book. All kinds of problems, at least with public-domain print-on-demand, which books are surely purchased more often by accident (i.e. not realizing you're buying POD junk) than on purpose, since they're usually not meaningfully cheaper than Dover or Modern Library or whatever, and even Dover puts out a much better product. They exist to trick unwary shoppers and gift-buyers. They're basically scams, in that they're relying on buyers' mistakes to make money.

Just because a book is print on demand doesn't mean it's badly formatted.

> They're also not edited to fit the page well, nor with much care for typography or anything else.

What does any of this have to do with printing? Those are formatting and typesetting issues. For the same final PDF it shouldn't matter how it's printed.

I think posters are talking (posting?) past one another here. There's the technology of print-on-demand, which can be fine, but then there's the reality of the quality level of a typical print-on-demand book on Amazon, which is not fine and is largely used to enable scammy overpriced selling of unedited Project Gutenberg texts to unwary shoppers, low-effort piracy, and letting self-publishing authors have a printed-copy option that's not really been formatted well for print (this is aside from any copy-editing issues, which crop up regardless of the format). IOW it's usually, at best, a bad product, and at worst an actual guy-selling-fake-and-stolen-Rolexes-on-the-street-corner hustle.

Hard to grasp the content when whole chapters are missing, though.

You may as well download ebooks from Library Genesis. At least the missing / repeated pages and corrupted formatting is fair at the price this way.

I remember reading several years ago about a major independent bookstore that got one of those high quality POD systems, and also installed computers for customers to use to go on Amazon to search for books and to read reviews.

The customer could find the book they wanted on Amazon, purchase it for the same price or less via the bookstore's POD service, go have a snack and drink at the bookstore's cafe, and their book would be ready when they are done with that.

The bookstore essentially turned Amazon into a free book research services for the bookstore's customers.

https://www.harvard.com/clubs_services/books_on_demand/

> We can print millions of titles (including Google Books) that are in the public domain, as well as thousand of publisher-permission titles right to order!

The selection isn't quite the "anything that Amazon has."

They also make note of the quality with some of them that are from Google Books https://www.harvard.com/ondemand/kiosk/

> Public domain Google Books are the scanned collections of a number of libraries, including the Harvard University Library, and they may contain notations, other marks, and scanning errors. Harvard Book Store makes no representation or warranty as to the content of Google Books, and Google Books are non-returnable.

I only bought one (by mistake, not knowing), which had pretty bad print quality compared to a proper four-color offset or high-end digital print. Also bad paper quality. This seems to be common.

I think it’s that they’re often of lower quality and less durable.

Poor quality, rampant piracy.

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