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 2 hours 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.

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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.

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dyauspitr an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Laser print quality today is on par with printing plates/offset printing, especially for just text.

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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.