The emergence of print-on-demand Amazon paperback books
alexerhardt.com
alexerhardt.com
The older books were printed using a process called offset printing. It needs large economies of scale to be financially viable, but it produces higher quality books. The newer books are printed with digital printing, which is just a fancy version of the laser (typical) or inkjet printer you have at home. I believe Amazon POD uses inkjet, but not sure. The result is a worse quality book, but also one that doesn't have thousands of copies taking up inventory space until it's sold. Virtually all publishers are moving low volume works this way. The fact that the quality is merely "subpar" instead of unusable is a testament to how much digital printing has improved in recent years.
Separately, paper quality has gone down industry-wide. Paper mills are simply choosing to focus on higher volume papers like those used in cardboard instead of producing fine paper. That means shortages, price increases, and publishers making do. Also, POD publishers don't want to keep every type of paper under the sun. They standardize inventory to keep prices down.
To make things even more confusing, the same work might be printed using multiple methods and different papers, with different inks. It's common to do a first run with POD to gauge market demand and then offset if sales continue. Or offset for a collector's edition, or vice versa to allow more colors.
Offset printing doesn't necessarily give better results than an inkjet/laser printer. My cheap laser printer from Costco produces much better output than most newspapers, and slightly better output than most old paperbacks. Fancy magazines are also printed using offset lithography and they do indeed have better print quality than my cheap old printer, but if I bought a better printer, then they'd be tied on quality again.
> It needs large economies of scale to be financially viable
Yes, but it needs much fewer copies than you'd expect. I help publish a small magazine [0], and we print it using offset lithography. We print roughly 700 copies of each issue, 3 issues a year, and 100 pages per issue. When I priced it out a couple years ago, offset printing was still cheaper than print-on-demand as long as we were printing at least ~200 copies.
Now, 200 copies is still quite a lot, but it's small enough that nearly every non-vanity-published book should have no problem selling that many copies. My impression is that the move to POD is not to reduce printing costs, but to reduce warehousing costs and the risk of overproduction. This is mostly a non-issue for us, since all the subscribers pre-pay for the whole year upfront and we mail the copies as soon as they're printed, but is much more of an issue for books where some unknown number of people will buy copies over some unknown amount of time.
The other big advantage of POD is that you can print it close to where the buyer lives. For the magazine that I help with, the cost of printing is almost a rounding error compared to the cost of international shipping, so it wouldn't surprise me if this is a major motivator for the big publishers too.
> Separately, paper quality has gone down industry-wide. Paper mills are simply choosing to focus on higher volume papers like those used in cardboard instead of producing fine paper.
Ah, that is not something that I was aware of, but now that you mention it, it does seem to match my impressions.
One reason that offset lithography has better quality is because of the ink, which can be mixed for a specific print job (called spot colors). Regular CMYK printing cannot achieve the color space that spot colors can.
Another reason is that typical offset lithography processes produce images with 2400 DPI, and it can go even higher than that. The highest DPI I've seen on a inkjet printer was 1200.
Digital printers, as in the fancy inkjets used to print at scale, can also use spot colors and I wouldn't be surprised if they could do more than 2400 DPI. They are giant machines that cost millions of dollars.
Sure, but not many products are printed using the best offset lithography practices, most are just using whatever's cheapest.
> One reason that offset lithography has better quality is because of the ink, which can be mixed for a specific print job (called spot colors). Regular CMYK printing cannot achieve the color space that spot colors can.
Yeah, spot colours are pretty cool, but my impression was that they tended to be used in things like packaging or books with hundreds of thousands of copies printed, not things that you could conceivably replace with with POD. Or am I mistaken here and spot colours are more widely used than I thought?
> Another reason is that typical offset lithography processes produce images with 2400 DPI, and it can go even higher than that.
Wouldn't that only be useful for greyscale though? I doubt that you could get good enough registration for 2400 DPI to be useful with multiple plates. Or is registration precise enough these days?
> The highest DPI I've seen on a inkjet printer was 1200.
These printers claim to be able to print at 2400 DPI [0] [1], but I'm pretty skeptical that the quality would actually be that good.
[0]: https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/p/pixma-ip8720#tech-spec-data
First, digital printing allows anyone to sloppily OCR public-domain works (or download them from Project Gutenberg), typeset the text haphazardly, and put it on Amazon. The result is terrible for reasons that have little to do with the limitations of the technology. Take the Russell book: terrible kerning ("Proble ms"), an AI-generated artwork... and I suspect the rest is about as bad.
The second problem is the technology also encourages "real" publishers to aim lower because there's no up front investment at stake? If you have an older, low-volume book, providing a shoddy version will make you more money than letting it go out of print.
From my point of view, what you are describing is "if you're the owner of an interesting but niche work, making it available in a basic version will please a lot of people who want to buy and read it".
The alternative to most of these 'shoddy versions' from reputable publishers is simply no version at all. Not sure why the author of the article wants to enforce this on people who actually want to read these books, rather than ooh over print quality and hoard them as luxury objects.
For someone who specifically likes the experience of a paper books, the option of a better print (or at least disclosure of the print quality) is highly desirable
For public domain works, poor quality printed copies could never be criticized as crowding out better quality copies.
> The fact that the quality is merely "subpar"
Like I say in a comment somewhere in the thread, a friend who owns a real Martin Eden from Penguin and saw mine said the typesetting was giving her a headache. I'll only know when I read it, but it certainly looks like crap.
> The author's problems are coming from digital printing, not the print-on-demand business model specifically
Many commenters seem to be fixating on this, but I don't think it fairly represents the thrust of the article, and I don't really have anything against POD as such. I don't think that books should conform to a certain abstract ideal of purity. My complaint is about their concrete quality. And as long as Amazon prints at this level of quality, I'd like to be informed before buying.
> Separately, paper quality has gone down industry-wide
I've noticed this in Penguin Classics, although many Spanish publishing houses are infinitely better. At any rate, most of the Amazon PODs are not even close to a modern Penguin.
I love physical books for general reading and will often buy both physical and ebook format for technical books to get the best of both worlds.
I now cannot stand print-on-demand books and, like the author, I can spot them very quickly. The quality is abysmal, and I might as well be printing them myself at that point.
I too used to default to Amazon, as the price was often about 30% cheaper. However, I've come to realise that you get what you pay for. In the UK, I just buy from Waterstones or local bookshops, as then I can trust that it has likely come from the publisher or at least can inspect in advance.
I am never buying a book from Amazon again.
Why don't you buy used books?
Plenty of supply for a book like the one he mentions, Knut Hamsun's "Growth of the Soil." No question that it was made to the quality level of the time when it was published; early 2000's is probably peak.
I understand some books are so new they won't have any used copies. But for everything else, there's an endless buffet to choose from.
To me this is like asking what's wrong with buying used underwear. You don't know anything about the paws that have thumbed those pages. I had a flatmate in my early twenties who would kick off every reading session by scratching his bottom - and then as he read, he'd sniff his fingertips as a focus aid. I am not kidding. But even if the previous owners haven't had repulsive habits, people still sweat, cough and sneeze, rummage obliviously, read naked with their books in their laps, or in their partners laps, put their books down to please their partners then pick them back up - do I need to go on? We have intimate relationships with books, and a second hand book has all the detritus of an intimate relationship with its previous owner. Then there's the yeasts, molds, mildews, weird stains - anything humidity, cooking smells, damp, rotten trash, dense flatulence, halitosis, disease etc has impregnated the pages with. There's nothing noble or romantic about that aggregate odor they all develop.
A better way of thinking about them is that they're like semi-digested bites covered in the dried belly juices of whoever hawked them back up. How hungry do you need to be? It's no different really to dogs tucking into vomit in the street. Each to his own, though.
If anyone’s concerned about the condition of used books, I’ve found their condition descriptions (https://www.alibris.com/popups/glossary/book-condition) to be reliable (indeed, books are often in better condition than indicated - I’ll happily order anything ‘fair’ or above).
I'm starting to get a feel for a pattern - the books tend to be more expensive, and also take longer on average to deliver (a few weeks, instead of a few days). The latter would be normal for rare editions and some third-party sellers, but if I'm ordering a popular book and it takes longer than usual to deliver I can kinda smell the dead rat. But the only way to know for sure is to open the box in disappointment.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-problems-of-philosophy-warb...
i’m so jaded im sure it would end up like trying to filter out shorts on youtube. click the “show me less of this” only for it to show you more.
This is simply an artefact of offset printing.
> Like for websites, this lowers the contrast and feels more natural for humans.
Text printed by an industrial laser printer on cream (or Natural Shade as it's called in the industry) paper looks discernibly crisper than what an offset printer produces.
Because they're not fabricating any printing plates or using an actual printing press, or any technology that gets you a high quality result. A print on demand book is basically going to come out of an office laser printer, because that's the technology for low-volume printing.
Most POD presses actually use inkjet because it's less expensive. The result is much lower quality.
Can you link to some high-resolution comparison scans to support this claim? I find it hard to believe that any toner-based process is going to result in a cleaner page and crisper text than a properly made-ready offset press run.
Why do you claim that so confidently, when many people say otherwise? Are you just going off some metric like DPI?
You're probably missing things like a sibling comment mentioned: "professionally printed books for example use slightly gray letters on creme paper." I don't think you could get "slightly gray" with a laser printer, and print-on-demand seems to basically use bright-white office paper (probably for reasons of laziness and cheapness).
Those people are fetishizing the limitations of offset printing. You simply can't produce sharp blacks comparable to an industrial laser printer with offset printing.
> I don't think you could get "slightly gray" with a laser printer
You absolutely can. But pure black on Natural Shade (off-white or cream) paper looks much better.
Most POD setups use inkjet printers for cost reasons which results in poor print quality.
In Blighty, if you can't buy locally, consider www.hive.co.uk
Hive allows you to donate a cut of the profits to a local independent bookshop of your choice, anywhere in the country.
No connection. Just a satisficed customer.
Amazon has a huge fake ebook problem as well.
I recently spent $2 buying an ebook that is still copyrighted. It is cheaper than the first item in search result that has more reviews. I thought, it's an ebook, what could go wrong.
Upon opening it, I found that the formatting is completely off. Words are concatenated. It was impossible to read.
A few days later, I noticed that the book is gone from Amazon store. I cannot open the link from my order page, and I cannot even ask for a refund. I had to ask customer service to do that. I guess this was a pirated book that was taken down.
It was a shame Amazon did not even notify me of this.
And I hope this doesn't happen on kobo or elsewhere.
That said, I've found at least one typo in every ebook I've read, even _Dune_ which I didn't get around to buying until it had been available in the Kindle store for _years_ ("pogrom" was mis-rendered as "program" and there was a formatting error in the glossary). I've been reporting all them using the interface, but not sure if they ever get fixed...
That said, it's not limited to electronic texts --- my second printing of J.R.R. Tolkien's _The Fall of Arthur_ also had a typo in it, but at least for that I was able to reach an editor at the publishing house who assured me that it would be corrected in later printings.
They could at least have warned a few days in advance. I would have stocked up on several lifetimes of books to read. A bit skeptic about post-2022 books anyway.
Going back to kindle isn't very tempting unless there is some reliable way to export their books again. Looks like it will be going back to paper books and reading books from Gutenberg (as I do a lot anyway).
I recently threw an LLM at it to turn the Obok plugin into a statically linked CLI in Rust, it works great.
For example, Lulu's hardcover books with linen wrap, dust jacket, "premium" B&W printing with 60# uncoated cream look pretty darn good: https://www.lulu.com/pricing
Of course if you typeset and edit your book like a moron, that's going to impact the quality, but this has nothing to do with POD.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo213648...
Fewer and fewer books get this treatment by experienced professionals and it is often left to the author to do this work. This is really a great resource!
I can see print-on-demand working very well, but not until the quality issues are sorted out. Being charged top dollar for something which is substantially inferior is unacceptable.
Even hardcover books from "real publishers" have arrived with low print quality. The most common problem book-printing problems I have a real problem with today are
1. text that is gray (not black) and
2. text that is dotted (not solid)
If you ask me, the following checkboxes should be standard ratings on all books sold:
[ ] "solid, black text"
[ ] "acid-free paper"
[ ] <we could add a few here>
Related, I used to buy 3rd party black laser printer toner that was guaranteed and warrantied to be made to OEM spec. It never, ever was, no matter how many returns/replacements/retries/print-settings-adjustments/other-part-replacements. Always gray text, always. Buying actual OEM black toner reliably results in (close enough to) jet black text. It costs more, but it's the only way to be sure for self-printed materials AFAIAA.
Terrible quality, and really did make me stop using Amazon for "vintage" books.
I prefer to buy used books locally, but given I don't speak the local languages I'm often forced to buy from abroad to get English editions.
Note that authors who take the easy way and use Amazon KDP w/ extended distribution appear on sites like BN, Books A Million, etc via the Ingram distribution but the physical copy will still be printed by Amazon and be inferior.
Some clues you can look for in general are - Amazon in the past two years has basically stopped stocking non-KDP POD books so they will almost always say avaialbe in X weeks (or if "Prime" 3-5 days). Amazon books are almost always a page count divisible by four and IIRC 828 pages is a limit on many trims.
So if you buy off of Amazon, check first to see that the Amazon listing looks like too.
It is really unfortunate that Amazon (and a few places in India) ruin it for everyone.
Amazon's business shouldn't be printing books and obviously they should state clearly that the book you are purchasing is printed by them.
The current solution? Just return the item.
Yes, and write a low stars review explaining the problem. Returns alone don't hurt future sales of identical items.
No matter, never mind.
And aggregated over all the books that use print on demand, the editors will notice.
Why? There is an argument that they should make it clear a book is printed on demand but I can't see why they shouldn't be in the business of POD.
One thing that is pretty annoying is when a PoD book that had colors in the original no longer has them, e.g. on charts, but text still refers to them with color names.
I'll likely stop buying from Amazon too because over the years quality of PoD books also seems to be dropping, it wasn't that bad years ago.
Kind of like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antilibrary
Similarly I ordered a spare set of strings for my niche musical instrument through a local music store 4 months ago, have called them at least once a month and it still hasn't arrived. Ordered them online from a German store, it arrived within 5 days. The excuses I've heard are: 1. they forgot to add it to the order 2. they order from many different suppliers and depending on the volume they will "collect" more orders from customers for a single supplier to keep delivery costs down, and for suppliers of niche products this can take a while. 3. It might have arrived at their warehouse but not at the shop. As a musician with concerts planned you can't just keep waiting for spare strings, you need them then and there before the concert.
That's a colossal benefit that you should treasure for as long as it lasts.
I'm not sure what actually happens, but I mostly stopped buying paperbacks on Amazon a good while ago, and if I do, and I'm unhappy with the quality I'll return it.
Like the OP himself (hi Alex), I'm also frustrated with the quality of books (many of which are print-on-demand) from Amazon.
Case in point: Algorithms Illuminated by Tim Roughgarden (https://algorithmsilluminated.org/). Great set of books, but poor quality, sadly. All printed on demand.
Ditto with Sebastian Raschka's (early) books from Packt Publishing (Python Machine Learning). Great content, but poor printing (very low contrast, etc).
This is not a debate on ebooks vs paper books, or PDF vs something else. It's about quality of printed books.
I paid $$$ for Kevin Murphy's _Probabilistic Machine Learning_ from MIT Press. Excellent quality paper, great printing. It's a keeper. I'll be reading it years from today. Just as I read (and have) books from decades ago. I might pass 'em on to somebody well deserving, not junking them to recycle.
Like OP, I want my books and my library to be long lasting. It's a joy. And I'm happy to pay a higher price if needed.
(My copies from a few years ago are print-on-demand, the poorer quality... hence the venting :-/ )
Most of these books are printed before 1990, so I know that no AI was involved, they are normally hardcovers, as those survive better, or are at least taken better care of.
For technical publications though it pretty rough. My go to book store normally have print on demand labeled as such. I don't have the best of luck with print on demand, so I tend to find an alternative.
Secondhand book stores are also usually much more interesting than even good new stores.
I often specifically look up old or first print editions of books (paperback or hardcover) and then buy them used from Abebooks etc.
However, the quality of the on-demand books via Amazon is hit and miss. It's not universally bad. Sometimes it is very good paper and sharp print. Sometimes it is cheapish white copy paper. The covers are universally bad. In Berlin they apparently come from Poland.
I also got on demand books in similar qualities from other German book sellers (buecher.de for example). On their page at least it's somewhat recognizable that it will be on demand, because they have some details about the manufacturer (themselves in this case).
I'm not necessarily against those on demand books, but I would really like if Amazon and other sites would
- let me know when I have to expect those books
- customize the quality options (e.g. paper color)
I find it more enjoyable to browse a local bookshop or charity shop and, if I want to buy something specific online I'll go with bookshop.org.
It’s ironic that in the 90s, we were warning about large retailers like Barnes and Noble pushing out smaller shops. Now we’re nostalgic for that experience also.
Amazon has truly ruined many things. We traded so much for the cheap convenience of fast shipping and a few dollars off.
There's more to it than that. The fast shipping and a few dollars off was a good deal.
But modern Amazon no longer offers fast shipping or a few dollars off. And, separately, they've stopped being willing to provide an amount of packaging that prevents your items from being damaged in transit. They're betting that having provided a good service in the past means they never have to bother in the future.
> modern Amazon no longer offers fast shipping
My main gripes are related to search being borderline unusable as it becomes more ad-dominated by the day, and overall trend of other Prime benefits becoming worthless, but not shipping speed or returns.
What? Every item arrives damaged. You can file several returns in a row, sure, but since you can't receive an undamaged item, this is not a "minor inconvenience". How does it help you to return the third damaged item and receive a fourth one?
Amazon has become the temu of books.
I eventually found the series in hard cover from Books of Wonder. I buy from them or seek out used hard cover books for out of copyright books now. Abebooks is still useful though they are owned by Amazon so who knows for how long that will last.
This isn’t specific to Amazon, I had the same issue with Waterstones in the UK (online)
I now just buy second hand (Abe, WOB) and hope for the best.
For the convenience aspect: Amazon deliveries routinely fail, require me to fetch the parcel at the entrance of my condo at inconvenient times, or require me the get my parcel at the condo concierge, again at inconvenient times, or the parcel is dropped at a random place.
I never had to return a book bought at the store. I do not even know their return policy. It may definitely be an issue someday in the future.
Christmas 2023: I ordered a number of books from the local bookstore. One failed to delivered, so
Christmas 2024: I ordered most of my books from Amazon. No two deliveries went the same (see above), total randomness.
Christmas 2025: I ordered ALL my books from the local bookstore (+600$). I started shopping earlier (end of November) and everything went smooth! They kept my individual orders at the shop and I could collect them all in one go. No stress.
The online shop of my local bookstore is simple and efficient. I can read book excerpts, just like on Amazon. But the total absence of clutter makes for a much more efficient experience and a huge amount of time spared.
I only mention it in passing the article but I'm regretting not showing pictures of how bad the page typesetting can get - perhaps I'll revise it this week. There's a substantial qualitative jump from "this book looks like a cheap knock-off" to "reading this is giving me a headache".
And yes, while I don't have a clue about the printing process, the image of an inkjet printer has also come to mind on occasion!
Yes, I know - anecdotal.
The copy I received two days later was (a) kinda shitty in terms of cover quality and whatnot and (b) had been printed in my state by Amazon in response to my order. I found that pretty unnerving, and it may have been the last book I ordered from Amazon.
Tbh i've given up on dead tree books with the lone exception of a few hard covers because ... space the final frontier.
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/p...
(trade paperbacks are the larger paperback editions printed on better paper than the mass market paperbacks, but still soft-cover.)
John Scalzi posted about this a few months ago:
"All my recent books went from hardcover to trade paperback and almost all of my backlist in mass market has now migrated to trade. The role of mass market paperbacks is now handled almost entirely by ebooks."
I used to prefer trades but have gone all in on mass market editions. They just feel better in my hands, especially larger volumes. Plus I can stuff it in a coat pocket on my way out the door.
And FWIW, I’ve found that the “printed by Amazon” editions have actually been higher quality than recent offsets. For example, the newest editions of Hitchiker’s Guide seem to have been laid out without any regard to the inner margin. It’s fiddly to read the first word on each line.
Meanwhile the Star Wars Legends mass markets fulfilled by Amazon in Italy and France have thicker, brighter, paper and clean margins.
For the mass market format, I have to take what I can get, and I’m glad that there are still reasonably priced editions available.
I've found low volume books from Lulu.com to be perfectly acceptable, though. Although the hard cover does feel a bit cheap.
These days it's hard to even get a proper book to read.
The author seems very distressed by this but it's a simple problem to fix: order your books from a bookstore. You'll be surprised what they are able to order.
If it's inadequate, there's plenty of places to buy books online that aren't Amazon.
OP gives a price in euros. Why buy American?
I live in Poland. I want to read books in the original English version. The main competitor to Amazon for ordering books in the original version would be libristo.eu, which is not Amazon, but it’s also not local and it’s far more expensive. On top of that, there are “local” online shops which engage in ordering things from Amazon to then only repackage them, as if they were bought locally. The books I’ve bought recently, all of them hardcover:
1. Lester W. Schmerr Jr., Sung-Jin Song, Ultrasonic Nondestructive Evaluation Systems. libristo.eu: 223.64EUR, Amazon: 83.84EUR.
2. Alan V. Oppenheim, Alan S. Willsky, Signals and Systems. Second Edition. Available from local Empik.com, but only in paperback version, and it’s a different edition. libristo.eu: 298.19EUR, Amazon: 237.81EUR.
3. Avinash C. Kak, Malcolm Slaney, Principles of Computerized Tomographic Imaging. Not available anywhere else than Amazon (to be fair, on Amazon I’ve also bought a used version, because there were none new).
4. David J. Griffiths, Introduction to Electrodynamics. libristo.eu: 67.11EUR, Amazon: 48.72EUR.
5. Thomas M. Cover, Joy A. Thomas, Elements of Information Theory. libristo.eu: 122.85EUR, Amazon: 83.38EUR.
As long as you buy hardcover versions, their quality tends to be a lot higher.
And I would not be able to find these books in any physical shop by just walking in. Even if some book was theoretically available, it would need to be imported.
(I’ll also preempt one possible criticism: it is not true that this state of affairs is caused by Amazon pushing out great local shops from the market. There used to be no easy options of getting technical books in original versions before Amazon, just translations, and only of a small number books in the most generic topics appealing to the lowest common denominator. You could maybe get Charles Dickens or Shakespeare in original version from Empik.com, maybe a Bruce Eckel book if you were lucky, but forget about getting a book like Elements of Information Theory. English proficiency in Poland is generally high, compared to Western Europe, but our local shops refuse to cater to it.)
For expensive, hard to find stuff, then of course one has to go on price. If you're seeing 50-100 EUR difference then no judgement here.
The original article, however, does not contain that sort of material. In fact, the piece is about low-quality print-on-demand books, which presumably mainly exist for very mainstream titles.
Using examples from TFA, I have no idea why anyone would buy paperbacks of Jack London or Bertrand Russel from Amazon. That's my beef, not your technical hardback collection.
As per my comment to the other commenter in the thread, there will of course be times when Amazon makes sense, for more expensive or difficult to source books.
Sometimes, a book may be desperately, urgently needed tomorrow.
Most of the time, the price difference isn't substantial and time isn't of the essence.
I'd rather keep my money in my local economy, rather than subsidising Bezos' next jaunt into space.
And honestly, given America's current behaviour, I'm currently of a mind to avoid sending a cent a across the Atlantic.
Better for all sides if a majority of buyers systematically returned them. Given the typical consumer doesn't even know what print on demand means, it is better for Amazon to keep it that way.
Sadly, I'm completely locked into the Amazon ecosystem for ebooks, but at least there I know what I'm getting.
I still have a kindle 4 from 2011 that works fine. If you have a lot of Amazon only ebooks, there’s nothing stopping you from keeping an old device for those.
I switched to a Kobo and have zero regrets. It has overdrive/libby support and I can check out books from my library directly to it. The Kobo store is fine as well and I can maintain a calibre library for everything else
It's a shame. Even for many classics the only way to get a decent copy is to either buy them second hand (often unfeasible) or to bind one yourself.
At some point leadership completely went off the rails on the quality vs quantity of its selection. I don’t shop somewhere because they have the biggest selection, I shop there because they have the BEST selection.
Some of this could be solved with better software via the search and browsing experience but that too just keeps going steadily downhill.
If the author instead went to that various used book stores around they would find treasures and probably enjoy the hobby more.
In fact I love the idea of high quality print on demand books that are distributed everywhere.
There may be something about the products being custom-made that causes this. I’ve had it happen with one that had a noticeable print defect (On Writing Well) but also to a few where I simply didn’t want a print-on-demand.
For affordability I would recommend anyone interested in reading to visit secondhand book fairs for the breadth of titles available, and yard/church/jumble sales for the chance finds. Instead of buying a book immediately when you come across a title you like or got recommended, maintain a wishlist spreadsheet and sync that to your smartphone or print it when you go hunting for books. The author of this article follows Umberto Eco's philosophy of book hoarding (as they should, and as I do), so they will have quite the collection to pick from already. Delayed gratification for any desired title is totally compatible with that.
And obviously: if you can't afford local booksellers, join a library — that is way cheaper than Amazon, and better for all concerned.
1: Frustratingly, this includes the mass paperback editions of Brandon Sanderson's The Stormlight Archive series.
They don't have a separate manufacturing process for mom-and-pop bookstores. Amazon do the printing and the logistics but deliver the book to the store instead of to your house so that the store can hand it to you and collect a very small amount of money.
Nothing. Local bookstores (not just 'mom-and-pop', but national chains or cooperatives) would tend not to have that title available. Is that a US thing that they would order from Amazon? Printing-on-demand is potentially interesting, but just not a thing for most titles.
https://techcrunch.com/2008/08/01/amazon-to-acquire-abebooks...
It's as if Amazon started selling pirated Nintendo games. Someone from Nintendo would be on their arses in very little time. And while I know very little about the publishing industry, I worked as a PM for Nintendo for four years, and can absolutely guarantee that it would go down like that.
Have seen a few people bootstrap themselves with POD and then move into traditional publishing.
Demanding people keep a massive stock of something just in case you want one is the height of privilege.
Most books available on PoD wouldn't be available at all without it. Not just less well known reissues but also new interesting books with limited readership, and books which larger publishers would ignore because of their own prejudices.
There are more luxury editions of classics than ever so quality-sensitive book collectors are still being catered for. And it's easier than ever to find secondhand copies of old books.
My self-published books via whatever it was called before being subsumed under the Kindle brand seemed decent enough quality, but I have received others from Amazon that were pretty bad (photocopy bad, for example).
Here is a comment I made few months ago complaining about why this isn't a thing already:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46219555
I kept getting disappointed when authors I liked were printing kindle-only or digital only books and short stories, that I would gladly pay extra for the cost of printing. I have no interest in spending what extra time I have in front of a screen. I've tried getting into it, it's just too distracting. Even on a kindle with no network access, it isn't convenient to switch between pages, it feels too much like scrolling on my phone.
The authors says enshittification, but I don't get it, you can still buy original copies. hardcover is the go-to if you want something more authentic, no one is printing those on demand. Pay for those, and let the authors make more money too that way. When I buy paperback, I don't care about all that, so long as the font, page size and other qualities are good (a nice cover won't hurt either).
For some books, they haven't had a publication in too long, and there are no used copies for sale on Amazon, I'd be very glad to get on-demand printed versions.
Like I say in the article, I don’t mind about print-on-demand as such - it’s the fact that these books are not particularly rare, they often come with bad defects, and they are pretty pricey.
1. If you care about the physical manifestation of a product, maybe Amazon.com is not the place to be shopping for it.
2. If the product as it arrives is substantially different from that ordered, it seems dishonest of the seller.
3. While the physical book is a source of joy for me as well, I feel lucky to live in a time where I can own a copy of a book that only a handful of people value, for a reasonable price.
I had a PDF version of On Lisp (Paul Graham put it on his website for free some time after it went out of print). I used lulu.com to turn it into a printed book (1 copy for myself). I love it. The cover art isn't great (low-res image; not Lulu's fault), but the paper stock is amazing (I got to choose it!). The print quality is also great.
Lulu provides some evidence that you can run a profitable business and still offer users the ability to do _very small_ print runs (1 book). I wish they (or someone like them) could work out a deal with publishers that would let me choose the paper stock I want when I order a book online.
But, maybe there are other options...
Two quotes from the article:
> I purchase most of my books through Amazon. I don’t find the speed of delivery that valuable, but the competitive pricing (especially factoring in Prime), ease of ordering [...]
> To add insult to injury, print-on-demand books seem to be significantly more expensive than stock equivalents
That's the classic enshittification playbook right there. Hook 'em with low prices. Once you've captured the market, lower your costs and raise prices.
Vote with your wallet. Go to a bookstore. Small and local is fun if you don't have a particular book in mind. If you do have a particular book in mind, check Barnes and Noble's website. It will tell you if it's in stock near you. If not, order it. If you go to pick it up and don't like the quality of the print/binding -- return it.
edit: fixed spacing for quoted text
It can happen that the particular printing person on that day fucks up though.
The problem is the print quality, not the idea. There’s nothing inherent forcing them to use the shittest paper on the market.
You'd say that a company that has its origin in books would know how to ship them properly.
because there's literally no other way your question will be answered