| ▲ | jn6118 a day ago |
| This article really resonates with me and I'm somewhat relieved to see someone else feels the same way. 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. |
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| ▲ | julianeon 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Something I don't understand: 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. |
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| ▲ | georgefrowny a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It's also incredibly annoying that Amazon slurped up AbeBooks way back in 2008. |
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| ▲ | nswango 32 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | biblio.org is a good alternative where I am (although personally I don't see the problem with having either the print-on-demand books or with buying used from Amazon as an option). | |
| ▲ | KPGv2 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Isn't AbeBooks for collecting old books? That's what I use it for. Abebooks and eBay. lots of out of print vintage niche books that way, like early JA->EN translations of novellas. | |
| ▲ | hkt 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It is annoying, but bookshop.org is a good alternative to both Abe and Amazon, presenting a single shop front to lots of bookshops. |
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| ▲ | dyauspitr 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| But why do print on demand books have to be low quality? It’s actually a pretty genius idea. You order a book, an automated machine prints out a high quality book indistinguishable from a regular paperback, pops it into a box and it’s ready for shipping. You could probably print one in under 5 minutes, no fees to store the books, you could have 10 times the “published” authors. |
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| ▲ | huijzer an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I print books myself at home and have a lot of Amazon books lying around. What usually is the problem with Amazon printed books is that the author didn’t put in the extra time to get everything right. Professionally printed books for example use slightly gray letters on creme paper. Like for websites, this lowers the contrast and feels more natural for humans. Furthermore, many Amazon books are just poorly formatted. Text too big, margins too wide, cover misaligned with spine, text not justified properly, and things like that. | | |
| ▲ | unmole an hour ago | parent [-] | | > Professionally printed books for example use slightly gray letters 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. |
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| ▲ | palmotea an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | > But why do print on demand books have to be low quality? 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. | | |
| ▲ | iamacyborg an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Fwiw the quality of the print from the few letterpress books I own is worse than the print quality on a decent hardback. | |
| ▲ | dyauspitr an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Laser print quality today is on par with printing plates/offset printing, especially for just text. | | |
| ▲ | palmotea an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > Laser print quality today is on par with printing plates/offset printing, especially for just text. 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). | | |
| ▲ | unmole an hour ago | parent [-] | | > professionally printed books for example use slightly gray letters on creme paper." 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. |
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| ▲ | unmole an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Hell, with commercial printers from the likes of Konica Minolta, the print quality for text is better than offset print. Most POD presses actually use inkjet because it's less expensive. The result is much lower quality. |
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| ▲ | GeoSys a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Is there a way to filter out such books when you browse Amazon? They should at least tell you it's an "on-demand" printed book before you order? |
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| ▲ | everybodyknows 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Why not just go to a better online seller? One of the books mentioned: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-problems-of-philosophy-warb... | |
| ▲ | aerhardt 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I haven't found one, like I mention in the article; I'll edit it if someone proves me wrong. 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. | |
| ▲ | toofy 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | i don’t know of a way. but even if you can, it will almost certainly be done away with. 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. | | | |
| ▲ | wussboy 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Not only am I sure there isn't one, I'm sure there will never be one. That might reduce profits for Amazon slightly. | |
| ▲ | SilverElfin 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Not that I can tell. It’s probably an intentional choice, just like how they don’t let you filter by country of origin. |
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