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Comment by lelandfe | Hacker News Reader

I read Brian's "UNIX: A History and a Memoir"[0] last year, which wound up also being an excellent snapshot of the goings-on in Bell Labs around that era. Kicked off a long month of Wikipedia binging. If you want more detail from a guy who was there, it's a good read.

I recommend not buying the print copy though: Amazon prints it themselves on demand and it's far and away the worst quality book I've ever held. The cover is pixellated and skewed, and most of the images inside look like they started life as 50×50px thumbnails.

Edit: apparently the Kindle version is "just the PDF of the paper version"[1] per Brian himself and is thus also terribly formatted. Welp, damned if you do. Still worth a read.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07ZQHX3R1/

[1] https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/memoir.html

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I got the kindle version and couldn't read it on the kindle due to how it was formatted, but I agree its a great book. I'm pretty sure it says it was created with troff, which is neat because a lot of the early days stuff he covers is about printing and laying out text.

my print copy didn't have the issues you mention.

Interesting! Maybe they changed the process at some point. I don’t own the book, but a while ago I had a quick look at my brother-in-law’s copy and it also had terrible printing quality.

Could be that Amazon sold you a counterfeit copy — it happens a lot with popular titles because of their inventory commingling.

Wow. I knew they had issues with counterfeit stuff on Amazon, but I didn’t know it also applied to the books they’re selling. Fascinating and horrifying :)

I know there was a widespread issue of counterfeit copies of "The Art of Electronics" to the point where the book's official website has a large warning on the front page.

Luckily you can return stuff to Amazon, but makes me think, does that mean someone else will have to deal with purchasing that book?

I bought it new, which means Amazon printed it on demand for me. So I'm not sure how counterfeiting would be possible.

Maybe the good copy was the counterfeit.

> Maybe they changed the process at some point.

I think it is more likely that, depending on your geographical location, they use different printing shops (they pick the one which is closer to you). And printing shops have widely disparate qualities, impossible to predict beforehand.

In the last years I've returned several 100-dollar Springer "hardcovers" because they were of laughably bad quality. Now I take only second-hand copies or buy them in bookstores, it's the only way to be sure.

I ordered it from Amazon and had the same issues...the cover was terrible quality and looked like it had been printed on someone's inkjet from the 90s. It was still a great read, though.

Does not matter. Get the book! It’s a concise and entertaining read! I loved it.

I just bought OSTEP from Amazon and it also has the problems you’re describing.

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