Tell HN: Books Printed by Amazon | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Books Printed by Amazon

92 pointssandman190655 comments

I buy a lot of books from Amazon (EU). Recently, more and more of the books I received were printed by Amazon themselves with the message "Printed in Poland by Amazon Fulfillment" on the last page.

They are of decent quality, though sometimes the cover art might be lower-resolution than that of an equivalent book from a bookshop. I double checked and all of these were sold by Amazon themselves (i.e., not a marketplace seller, where I would suspect a piracy issue). The cover material is always this unpleasant matte rough-feeling paper.

Is there anything nefarious going on here? Does Amazon have permission from the publishers to distribute their books like this? The books that I received were of different publishers (Penguin, Basic Books, among others).

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I bought two Springer books from Amazon that turned out to be print-on-demand. The font size and weight made them uncomfortable to read so I returned them.

I bought another self-published book that was also print-on-demand. The larger font size made it readable although the font weight makes the footnotes look quite bad.

I wish Amazon would show on the product listing that it's a print-on-demand book since they're inferior to traditionally printed books with the equipment currently being used.

It’s unfortunate because Amazon PoD books have been big quality - sometimes. But the person setting them up has to opt for some of the higher price features, and check fonts/print samples.

(One of the advantages with PoD from Amazon is you can order boxes of your own books at cost.)

Probably, they chose the DEV team which coded this, for their hatred of books. EG, no dogfooding.

Kind of odd that it's a different font, if they'd work closely with the publishers there would be no need for that just take the closest paper size available on-demand, adjust the margins accordingly and otherwise print it exactly as it was intended.

You’re vastly underestimating the complexity, variety, and idiosyncrasy of tools and formats used by publishers.

Unfortunately, nowadays, even books bought directly from Springer are print-on-demand (PoD). This isn't so bad for paperbacks, but the hardcovers tend to be glued and have very stiff spines which make the books difficult to keep open (though this has improved of late).

Compare with the older Springer-produced PoD hardcovers that were Smyth-sewn and of very high quality.

I had the binding break on a brand new Springer math textbook about 25 years ago which was very disappointing cause that book was expensive.

Amazon has had a print-on-demand service [1] for a while so the real question is whether major publishers have been signing deals to use it. Maybe from their perspective it's worthwhile for older books, to avoid maintaining lots of slow-moving inventory?

[1] https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/GHKDSCW2KQ3K4UU4

I think this is right. Some book stores in the US even have print-on-demand machines inside the shop. See https://www.ondemandbooks.com/ for more info about the printers.

Most publishers make good money on their backlists, with a slow trickle of sales across a huge number of titles. Amazon and other stores don't always want to stock these titles because they take up a lot of shelf space.

Publishers may not want to put them into book stores because they may be returned if unsold, and the return process is costly. So print-on-demand (POD) makes sense for both parties.

Amazon has been running a pretty big POD operation for years for its Kindle Direct Publishing arm, so they have the infrastructure to print books for others as well. And yes, depending on the machine, the covers may not look quite as nice as the covers from offset printers.

diamondap -- I see that you're an author yourself, do you know much about how the industry functions on the publisher side? I'm trying to learn more about the space (both out of personal curiosity as I've been working on a book myself and because the more I learn the more I'm interested in building something in the industry).

If you're willing to chat, happy to ping you through your website!

Edit: I see on your personal website you also have a publishing co, would love to get your insight

> I think this is right. Some book stores in the US even have print-on-demand machines inside the shop. See https://www.ondemandbooks.com/ for more info about the printers.

Here's a video of the machine in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJUla8xJ5BM

Thanks for posting that. That's pretty cool.

Yes - speaking with ex-colleagues now at AWS this sort of thing is exactly what happens. Finite resource is warehouse space, so use that on the popular inventory and allow publishers to POD.

To all you folks complaining about the quality of POD books, you should know that the book designer has a lot to do with the book's readability. Many self-published authors who design their own interiors choose bad fonts out of ignorance, or make the font too small to reduce page count and cost. Print design is really an art. The big publishers take it seriously, and some self-published authors do as well.

As for blurry covers, a common mistake among self-published authors is not preserving the aspect ratio for cover art. They'll stretch an image, or use a low-resolution image. Again, this is done out of ignorance or carelessness. Major publishers know to pay attention to these details.

POD publishers like Ingram Spark also let you choose the type of paper and cover finish. They can produce good paperbacks. Maybe Amazon's POD system chooses cheaper paper by default. I'm not sure.

For our backlist, the titles most likely going to POD are old enough that sometimes all we have work from are scans of the physical copies. Our back catalog goes back quite a long ways. POD quality still varies a lot, though short run digital printing has improved significantly in the past decade or so.

Seconded. The pod books I have printed at Amazon look exactly like the pdf and cover art I submitted. I worked hard to follow their specifications.

Material quality felt "fine" to me, but haven't really done an analysis.

This makes me hyper sad. Seems Amazon are just making things worse with everything they do. Ever tried to buy something like a USB hub or charge cable off Amazon? Endless suspect brands you've never heard of with poor quality. Now they are normalising books with blurry cover art and hard to read text due to budget printing?

Buy from a book shop.

> Buy from a book shop.

Authors use on-demand printing from Amazon because ordering a full print run is significantly more expensive, and due to lack of demand they'd never be able to recover the costs. These kinds of books aren't promoted by a top publisher and don't have shelf space at your local bookstore. Chances are if it weren't for Amazon they wouldn't be available for purchase at all.

People don't seem to realize how absurd it is that you can have an idea for a book, type it out, upload it to Amazon, publish it on the Kindle store, and print and ship a hardcover copy to anyone in the world all in a matter of days. If you told this to an aspiring author lining up in front of publishing houses 20 years ago they would have laughed in your face because of how unbelievable it sounds. "Oh but the cover art is blurry"...seriously? Who the hell cares?

`"Oh but the cover art is blurry"...seriously? Who the hell cares?`

I care.

Stick to the big five publishers section at Barnes & Noble then, and excuse the indie authors who don't have the budget to make your bookshelf look good.

No, our standards shouldn't be that low that we accept blurry covers. It's likely a good quality proxy of the content though. Attention to details is often important.

Published some books, none of them had blurry covers.

The books themselves feel a bit flimsy though, compared to well-printed books that have a sturdier feel. They still cost £30+ each and the quality of the finished product doesn't really match up with the price. And we're not just talking about indie self-publishers, I've noticed a drop in print quality from PragProg, Packt and O'Reilly too. For a while I thought this was just Amazon shipping shit quality material until Waterstones and Bookshop were sending them too.

The lower barrier to entry for self-publishing is not an excuse for a race to the bottom on quality. I can't imagine many of these books surviving as long as, say, my battered copy of K&R C.

I've bought books from book shops recently which were of pretty abysmal quality. With paperbacks publishers seem to do a decent run and then any reprints are closer to photocopy quality. Often the front cover is missing some of the edges (as in the design has been enlarged and then cropped to fit the standard size).

Basically I love books but publishers are stuck in a race to the bottom with quality.

Oh man I wish I could buy more from a book store. The selection is always so bare around me and there is never a single software book in sight, which are the kind of books I read most often. Ebay ends up being the champion for me.

> They are of decent quality

I got two and they were absolute shit.

So much so that it was the first time ever I actually returned something to Amazon. From blurred cover "art" stretched from what looked like 30dpi image to godawful sans-serif font in humongous size with line spacing so tight some characters ascenders and descenders overlapped. Made my eyes bleed. Even if they paid me to read this, it still would've been a torture.

I had a similar experience. Transparent paper with glossy ink that made looking at images not enjoyable, visible pixels in the text. I don't care about the ugly cover but the reading experience was in some ways inferior to an e-ink device, while it should be the opposite.

Maybe their strategy now involves degrading the print experience sufficiently that people start thinking their Kindles are the superior experience.

First they came for the bookstores, then they came for the publishers….

I worked for Amazon for two years. They always were very proud of their customer obsession and in some ways it really showed (great customer service, very speedy deliveries).

But what I never understood is how it never seemed to be a problem that over the years, the site is just filled with low quality / alibaba imports / bad products.

On a side note, the number of vendors that offer you to remove a bad review in exchange for a full refund (and you get to keep the product) is also making me lose all trust in their review system.

Product idea: use reddit to obtain 3 price point options for all items deemed of high quality (or at least that people are happy with). Say cordless vacuum cleaners and have an extension in chrome that only displays these 3 options when you look up for this item in Amazon.

Amazon changed from being a marketplace for high quality products to being a marketplace for their own products while also allowing some cheap junk to boost their numbers. Just open the site and see the prominent categories – Amazon clinic, Amazon Fresh & Whole Foods grocery delivery, One Medical, Amazon Pharmacy, Amazon Music, Prime Gaming, Echo & Alexa, Fire Tablets, Fire TV, Kindle, Audible... There's really no high quality third party retail over there anymore because manufacturers can now easily ship on their own and avoid Amazon's massive cut.

I worked on Amazon's fulfillment software a long time ago. Short version is: quality is an arms race between Amazon and a lot of _very-motivated_ cheaters, and Amazon is always behind. At least when I was there, they wanted to fix stuff, but only in an "cost-effective, at-scale, multi-year-project" kind of way, rather than the simple obvious solution of "throw lots of people at the problem until it goes away". My guess is that they're somewhat more worried now as tides have shifted away from their reputability, but they're nevertheless probably in like year 3 of a ten-year plan at the moment.

It's past time to stop recommending Reddit, not because of the recent shenanigans, but because it's already been a few years at least that Reddit has been filled with marketing spam, fake accounts, and astroturfing.

Yeah, recently got one as well, the reviews had a picture of what I actually wanted, the product I got was PoD (this was a collection of Lovecraft stories, so public domain). Started a return, and Amazon just refunded and told me to keep the book …

FWIW, it’s not horrible, it’s a hard cover and not horrible in quality, just not what I wanted.

In the end, I got what I wanted on eBay classifieds for barely more than the amazon book, and less than what the big book stores with 3 weeks + delivery times wanted. Not technically new, but undistinguishable.

I've had a mixed outcome from Amazon POD. On one hand, I've gotten great quality books that wouldn't be available due to being old and not worth stocking or from small authors that wouldn't have the resources. On the other hand, I've gotten some real trash (physical quality, I can't blame them for content quality).

I think it may be based on the author to choose what they want the quality of the cover and pages to be, at a higher book price. I bought a book that an old coworker had written (not good, very much a cash grab short book, but I was interested in POD), and the cover was an awful matte finish with really low quality pages and print quality.

I've also gotten some good quality books from them, but they're always more expensive, so I bet there's some opt-in quality tradeoffs to be made by the original publisher/author.

I have some of these hardcover pod books, authored by qntm [1] and their website points to Amazon as a supplier. So I assume its legitimate in that case.

I also have Andriy Burkov's Hundred-Page Machine Learning Book in pod paperback, and the author advises buying it from Amazon to avoid scammers profiting from repackaging the open source content. So again, apparently legit.

The books themselves seem of decent quality - not as good as a sewn hardback binding, but perfectly good. Interestingly they have a guid printed on the final page which I suspect is unique to the physical book.

The ones I have come from Poland. As I'm in the UK, the potential for reducing book-miles is maybe not being realised yet.

[1] https://qntm.org/fiction

I self-published a book on gardening and learned how much I enjoy the design/marketing/sales aspect of the self-publish industry almost as much as I enjoy writing.

Something I learned quickly is that local bookstores & libraries will often refuse to carry books that are Print-on-Demand from Amazon. There are several other POD suppliers online and it’s really cool to compare the features and cost models across each supplier.

My Amazon POD books were nearly identical in quality to some books I printed with another provider — and as a few others have said it was magic to see how many sales I got with zero advertising.

So would you stick with Amazon in this case or lean towards another POD publisher like Lulu or others?

Depends on what you’re going for. If I was serious about sales, I’d publish through something like Lulu or Ingramspark. I really wanted a way to publish a few copies of something personal to me, and for that I’d actually recommend Amazon. It was super high quality and super cheap — especially if you wanted to get author copies.

Soooo….your mileage may vary!

I was definitely looking for the latter, I appreciate the insight!

Ah this makes so much sense!

I bought a book on Amazon Germany last year, 1000 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think, and as soon as I opened it I had a feeling it was a pirate copy. I even tried to find the book in a physical book store so I could compare, but didn't find it.

Just took it down from the shelf and went to the back page, and yes it's printed in Poland by Amazon Fulfillment.

I suspected it because the print looks weird, almost like a photocopy, uneven and thin and pale. The paper is like printer paper, and in general it just doesn't feel premium.

So the mystery is solved, but I feel cheated, even though the book was rubbish anyway.

> the book was rubbish anyway.

Why is it still on your shelf then :)

You need a few stinkers on your shelf to offset any suspicion that you don't actually read your books and just buy the ones that make you look intellectual from the background of your video call.

Hah I’ve been meaning to give it away but I don’t want to inflict it on anyone I like.

Bahahaha!

Are these similar to ones from Lightning Press/Lightning Source? I used to complain about those years ago. A few of my more niche textbooks come from them. They are really poor quality. Bad printing with cheap feeling paper and bog standard binding.

On the other hand, I have a book from Lulu[0] and it's actually really nice. Not quite up to a "real" textbook but at least as good as a professional mass-produced paperback.

[0] https://www.lulu.com/

They’re legit - most of the times. Most of the times it’s cheaper to print on-demand if you don’t know how many copies you’re going to sell. For instance, OpenStax usually prints its books through Amazon.

I’m surprised hearing about big publishers such as Penguin using the on-demand service though. Maybe they use it to provide books which are out-of-print or which don’t sell a lot.

Given Amazon scale, I’d not be surprised if some of them are being sold by non copyright owners though.

These were all books that were quite recently published and I have seen all of them in bookshops.

In the past, I have received n>1 books which were sold by marketplace sellers but fulfilled by Amazon. Same inscription "Printed by Amazon", but these clearly had things wrong with them, like font issues.

Just browsed through some of my recent purchased books from Amazon and I found the same. Books from Cambridge University Press. I imagine Amazon might be offering those PoD services to big press companies especially for older books. The cover art is indeed slightly blurred, but seems like the pages are fine.

I've got a few. They're not quite as nice as 'proper' books, but the reduction in having to transport and store books before they're sold, and the fact that it means Amazon can have a much bigger inventory, means I'm fine with them. I can deal with having a lower quality book if it means I can get the book I want.

The only real downside is that I'm very reluctant to buy someone else a book as a gift from Amazon. I'll go to a book store in that situation.

If you extrapolate those criteria further; less nice, less transport and storage and more inventory you end up with e-books. But I absolutely understand that your personal preference is somewhere in the middle (while mine is at the end).

There are many kinds of books that are very difficult to read as ebooks

Almost every book I read nowadays that isn't a textbook is read on my Kobo. (Is there a word for that kind of book? The type you read through once from beginning to end.)

But for textbooks and other reference materials, a paper book (or just stapled papers) is by far the best technology available. The speed of information retrieval is unparalleled, especially once you become familiar with the layout. Flipping backwards and forwards between pages and thumbing to the correct place by memory is common. Not to mention that you have as much "screen" space as desk space, and you can even pile them on top of each other if that's not enough.

This is a good time to link one of my favorite short stories, 'Fulfillment' by Miracle Jones, about a person who works in an Amazon warehouse which prints books on demand (from 2014, so they've been doing it at least that long):

http://www.miraclejones.com/stories/fulfillment.html

Even my copy of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is Amazon PoD

Ha! I remember slogging through that as an undergrad. Afterwards, I was hoping for something less dense and arcane. But the next book was Heidegger's Being and Time.

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