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I agree with the broad point of the article, but the author misidentifies what's going on. The author's problems are coming from digital printing, not the print-on-demand business model specifically and Amazon isn't the only company doing it.
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.
Author here, thanks for the comments. Let me address a few points in turn:
> 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.
> The older books were printed using a process called offset printing. [...] 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. [...] The result is a worse quality book
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.
That's one part of the story, but I think you're glossing over two other issues.
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.
> 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.
Most of these are also available in ebook (free ebooks, in the case of public domain works like the Bertrand Russell), which makes me think that the people who don't value paper books in-and-of-themselves probably aren't buying the shoddy paperbacks either.
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
Sure. I'm not arguing it's fundamentally bad. But it's going to leave some buyers unhappy because nowadays, the point of paperbacks is that you're paying extra for a reading experience, not the text itself. An ebook is always less (or free).
Incidentally, we do last printing of small runs of books (10 to 100 copies) and can achieve good quality. It’s a choice to have good quality though.
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.
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.
It's also incredibly annoying that Amazon slurped up AbeBooks way back in 2008.
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 buying used from Amazon as an option).
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.
It is annoying, but bookshop.org is a good alternative to both Abe and Amazon, presenting a single shop front to lots of bookshops.
Betterworldbooks.com is my go to. They usually have everything for decent prices. And you can buy used or new for most things.
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?
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.
Why not just go to a better online seller? One of the books mentioned:
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-problems-of-philosophy-warb...
I can't necessarily speak for that specific book, but a youtuber I follow (who has POD books as one of her particular bugbears) has stopped recommending bookshop.org after personally getting POD copies from there.
They don't work for Germany unfortunately.
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.
There are uBlock Origin filter rules for shorts. They work :)
Not in the mobile app.
You don't even have the problem if you use NewPipe or PipePipe as the app for YouTube. That's with F-Droid on Android, don't know about iOS.
I concur!
Not only am I sure there isn't one, I'm sure there will never be one. That might reduce profits for Amazon slightly.
Not that I can tell. It’s probably an intentional choice, just like how they don’t let you filter by country of origin.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Fwiw the quality of the print from the few letterpress books I own is worse than the print quality on a decent hardback.
Laser print quality today is on par with printing plates/offset printing, especially for just text.
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.
> 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).
> 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.
There's far less to recommend Amazon than there once was. Service quality has dropped. Their recommendation engine was better 10 years ago than it is today, e.g,. recommending an item I've already bought or items in my cart isn't a recommendation. Using the USPS for final delivery doesn't help as "Prime Delivery" can now take a week or more to arrive here. And then the postal worker will do everything in their power to cram the book in the mailbox. I've returned about half of the books that I've ordered in the last year. Consequently, I've been ordering more through the local B&N and picking it up in store. There I can see the quality and condition before deciding to keep. And I wish poor quality book publishing was limited to Amazon. It's not. I ordered a new copy of Apostol Calculus direct from Wiley. It was expensive ($300+). It turned out to be print on demand as well and of such poor quality that many equations were illegible. It was "new" but unusable and I was able to find a used copy in fine shape. Fundamentally, in my view, publishers are killing the book industry. Eliminating mass market paperback drove up the price of trade paper as well as digital. Consequently, many books become "unaffordable" from a demand perspective, i.e., many of us are unlikely to throw away $25+ for a causal airplane read. We'll acquire it used later, or borrow it from the library, if we bother to read it at all. Further, with younger generations reading physical books far less often than their parents or grandparents, they've initiated a feedback loop that doesn't end well for the industry. Amazon doesn't care. Books aren't their driver anymore. So the reader draws the short straw.
Somewhat related:
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 has been a problem since the beginning of ebooks --- I happened to be browsing the Sony e-book store on a day when they offered a $10 credit, so I bought a copy of Heinlein's _Space Cadet_ --- it was so badly formatted and so riddled with errors I had to go to a library to consult a print copy so as to fully enumerate all of the typos in it. Since then I was issued a check for the price-fixing lawsuit, and that purchase was transferred over to a different e-book store where there was a better copy (though I haven't had occasion to re-read it since).
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.
I was happy a few years ago when I found a site selling DRM-free EPUBs on many topics I am interested in, but with no prior warning last week they sent out an email saying they no longer do that and instead you have to buy and read books through some special app.
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).
It's not very hard to remove the DRM from Kobo or Google Play Books.
The blame is somewhat misguided: what's blame to here is cost-cutting, not printing on demand. If you're willing to pay, you can get POD books that, certainly to the untrained enough, are indistinguishable from "real" books.
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
Yeah, I'm leaning towards that conclusion as well. While I don't publish my writings, I have a few friends who do. The stuff that comes from Lulu, even the cheapest "models", is honestly fine. The ones from Amazon, not so much.
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.
I have to recommend the following:
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!
Hi author here. I've bought a probability textbook from Lulu and it was fine. I don't blame POD but rather misinformation and poor quality. Almost all the POD books I've received from Amazon are very distinguishable from real books.
It's not just Amazon. I bought a copy of an ARM assembly book from a proper bookseller (Blackwells) which was a proper hardback for a high price--something like £80, and I received a print-on-demand mess with a hardcover. The print was there but barely legible, a dotty mess which gave me a headache. I returned it.
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.
Yes, this.
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.
Just for a bit of balance, another book I bought was the ZYNQ book and companion materials. It's made by a university in collaboration with Xilinx. They don't hide that because it's niche and low volume, they used a print-on-demand service. I even went and looked them up, and it's a small UK printer with pretty reasonable pricing for self-publishing small runs of books. The quality was great, no problems with it at all. So it /can/ be done.
Acid-free is debatable, non-archival books frequently last decades or even centuries
Interestingly I bought a book on Z80 assembly last year, I thought I was buying a used book printed in the 80s or so. Instead it was shiny, glossy, and obviously printed on demand.
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.
A lot of comments very dismissive of anything "print on demand". As an author of a niche book in both hard/soft, I chose Lightning Source/Ingram because they produce quality books. At that time (2012) I could have gone the "easy" route and used Amazon but even then there were complaints about quality. I've received quite a few compliments about the physical quality of my book, primarily the paper back edition which I believe was 60lb cream paper stock.
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.
I don't think POD is the problem either, as there's another comment here that they're seeing non-POD books with the same quality (or lack thereof). It's the printers they're using.
I'm buying ungodly numbers of books and I'd say more than half of what I get from Amazon is PoD, and print quality varies. In my country (Poland) they have one huge advantage: the price. It's quite often somewhere between 30%-50% cheaper than alternatives which is significant given book prices.
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.
What are you buying ungodly numbers of books for? To read them?
I am not gp, but I like to have a nice collection of unread books to browse and pick from, not (to almost quote someone, from my vague memory) "shelves full of books to impress others with what I have already read".
Kind of like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antilibrary
Controversial take but... don't buy from Amazon? If you really care about quality and physical media you can go to a bookstore or at least form a relationship with a smaller online seller.
I've experienced this. Actually when I received the book from Amazon I thought it was a counterfeit copy, only to discover that on the very last page it says: "Printed by Amazon Logistica Italia S.r.l".
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.
> 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.
That sucks for the author of the book though, if their books start getting low ratings for something entirely out of their control.
Bertrand Russell has been dead since 1970. I think he'll be okay. Or no worse off.
No matter, never mind.
It does indeed, yet if the review makes it clear that the text of a book is not at fault, that the crappy print on demand edition is the issue, it should not matter too much. It would even give them arguments to ask a few pointed questions to their publishers.
And aggregated over all the books that use print on demand, the editors will notice.
They don’t have a publisher, that’s the point. Only wealthy authors supported by the proper publishing houses can afford to have 50,000 books printed offset.
And Amazon will not publish your review.
In my experience, when you return them Amazon refunds you and tells you to keep the book.
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Here's how the last two books I ordered from amazon went: Book 1, low quality print barely readable code segments and the cover reads "Not for reprint outside of India". Book 2, over a month passes with no shipping update. I submit a cancellation request and it gets denied. I then contact customer support (extremely hard to do btw) and they also deny my request. Another week passes and it is randomly canceled and then the book arrives in the mail from a printing company with extremely bad binding.
Amazon has become the temu of books.
As a French reader, from a small city with multiple independent book shops: The simplest fix wouldn't be to just stop buying from Amazon ? Independent bookstores and used book sellers solve every problem in this article, often at better prices. They also deserve the support. Reading "elevates minds", but the shops, publishers, and supply chains don't sustain themselves on good vibes alone.
> a small city with multiple independent book shops
That's a colossal benefit that you should treasure for as long as it lasts.
> Wouldn’t it be better for all sides if Amazon at least informed us that a book will be printed on demand and allowed us to make a decision before buying?
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.
Like many commenters, I much prefer a publisher's version to Amazon's print-on-demand, so much so that when I deduce a book is print-on-demand from the thumbnail provided (POD front covers are universally primitive and basic), I continue looking at various other cover images until I find one that's clearly mass market publisher product. I buy it used, "Good" or better. I'll pay more for a used original than a new POD iteration.
Regarding quality, I have noticed a considerable decline in non-on-demand quality of paperback books in recent years as well. Paper is often really bad, printing quality even worse. Very often the text is grayish pixelated, I'm guessing this is because the publishers have stored some subpar digitized version of prior editions, which on reprints comes out like an ereader from 20 years ago.
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 remember getting some questionable quality books from amazon which didn't match up to the usual standard of a publisher. No Starch Press called this out in the past saying amazon sell counterfieght books. https://x.com/nostarch/status/1183095004258099202
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.
Buy second hand books if you can: wider selection, good for the environment, lower price (usually), supports small businesses (usually).
Not sure how feasible this is for new publications, but yes, absolutely buy second hand. I have a fairly large stack of yet to be read books gifted to me by people cleaning up book shelves, as well as large number of books from second hands store.
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.
I will add that using eBay and ThriftBooks, it's super easy to get your hands on used books even if you're in an area without a large bookstore.
I don't have any reason to believe this is not a scam. If Amazon had any good intention in doing this, why didn’t they simply note on the webpage that this book is printed on demand? Those introduction on pages look exactly the same as those for the original edition. It’s only once you’ve received the book that you realise Amazon has printed it themselves. I don’t like this game, and now I never buy books from Amazon unless I absolutely have to.
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It is not just the print, it is also the way pages are cut and bound. The printed area is not where it should be on the page.
When I was searching for a good copy of The Wizard of Oz to read to my kids it was impossible to use Amazon. Since the book is out of copyright but still popular the results are for terribly formatted print on demand paper backs that don't include the illustrations. It's out of copyright, spend a little effort and do a good job!
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.
Search for the MinaLima edition of the Wizard of Oz, it's absolutely stunning.
Don't buy from Amazon and expect anything but. Knowing the kind of company it is and still being a customer is inexcusable.
I like to buy books and would never buy from Amazon. Haven't for a long time for many reasons.
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.
Bookshop.org will also pair with local book stores and share some profits. Win-win
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.
> 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.
The last 3 books I’ve purchased from Amazon (UK) have been of questionable quality. The most recent was Designing Data–Intensive Applications (O’Reilly) and I’m still not sure if it’s print on demand, counterfeit- or just a reject. Roller marks, damaged pages, slightly off print. The returns process is inconvenient, one-offs are okay but on multiple purchases it’s fatiguing and so the book stays.
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.
Your DDIA book might be an international version. Check if it says the edition is only for sale in India.
It's usually extremely prominent if the book is an India only edition.
For sure, if both Amazon and the seller are doing things the way they are supposed to be. There is a small chance, however, if the OP either purchases from an unfaithful third party seller, or somehow inadvertently from a third party seller even though they purchased from Amazon.com, due to how inventory is mixed (Amazon kept doing this for years).
I mean, it will be very obvious from the physical book itself.
Pro-tip: support your local bookstore.
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?
Because either only Amazon sells the books I want to buy or the alternatives are other non-local shops that are usually far more expensive.
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.)
My friend, I lived in Gruzja for many a year. My local shops in Tbilisi were pretty limited in terms of English-language content, I feel your pain.
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.
For books in English, Amazon is considerably less expensive than anything local, and can also be significantly faster, instead of being a “special order”.
There is a hidden cost to Amazon, and it's the death of our high streets and independent retailers.
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.
The trick with Amazon is only ordering items if they are eligible for Prime delivery. Amazon seems to put those items under a lot more scrutiny, and I’ve never had a problem when ordering this way.
Yes, I know - anecdotal.
My local book store accepts online orders and I can fetch my books from the shop a few days later. I am finding this more convenient than Amazon, even if a little more expensive. I also appreciate to have a book store in town, for the few times I have to find a present and have no idea and little time.
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.
Replying to myself
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.
It’s easy to tell when these books are printed by a high-volume inkjet printer. They are not as pleasurable to read. It’s a certain fuzziness, like when cinemas first went to digital, and when planetariums got rid of their optical star projectors.
I had a friend over and we talked about the subject. She owns a Penguin stock copy of Martin Eden and upon checking my print-on-demand copy her first reaction was: "Yea, this looks like crap, but above all, the type is making me dizzy".
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!
I’m a very prolific reader who primarily reads ePubs and occasionally printed books (mainly because I’m running out of space to keep books at home). One thing that I’ve noticed in modern prints is the subpar spines. I’ve books from 90s with their spine intact and going through continuous reads vs recent buys that come apart and require a rebinding on just few reads.
Isn't paperback basically dead in the US because most sales are digital now?
Tbh i've given up on dead tree books with the lone exception of a few hard covers because ... space the final frontier.
Mass-market paperbacks are definitely dying, but trade paperbacks continue to sell (at rates lower than mass-market, obviously):
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."
It may be interesting to note: according to the prices on Amazon for books that are out of print in mass market format, there is a significant demand among fans of the form factor.
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.
Readers in the US still overall have a preference for physical books: https://www.tonerbuzz.com/blog/paper-books-vs-ebooks-statist...
I gave up, bought a kobo libra2 that never saw an internet connection (you can find updated firmware online to download) and now just borrow epubs in the soulseek library.
I hope the kobo store has rigorous screening of their books, unlike Amazon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47386280
These days it's hard to even get a proper book to read.
I also just brought the cheapest oldest b&w model kobo reader still on sale and put epubs on it. Haven’t even updated the OS. Just works. Sweet.
That works for the books you copy over, but those that come from Kobo will be downloaded as part of a sync that also does updates.
There are excellent english book stores in Madrid, and if you enjoy collecting books, you'll most likely enjoy the experience of going to one and buying a book there. If the book you're looking for is out of stock, they can usually get it for you the next day. There is literally no reason to buy books on Amazon.
There are a few things I take away from this post:
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.
Many people are mentioning bookshop.org and I would be happy to try it out but I want to note that they don’t ship outside the US and UK.
Comment was deleted :(
I've gotten a few of these and each time I've filled out the Return form, Amazon's response has been "ok, we're refunding your card, no need to return the item".
Yes, as I mention in the article, that has happened to me to me a few times as well.
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.
I've bought some older hardcover books from Springer (and not for very cheap, mind you) and even then you can get some absolutely despicable print-on-demand abominations. Some appear to be created by scanning the original works in low resolution and then printing using some crappy inkjet. Good luck deciphering any subscripts in the formulas! Of course, to add to the insult, the binding is usually terrible as well.
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.
This is partially why I don't buy print books anymore, unless I have no other choice (like random region restrictions on ebooks I want to read).
Sadly, I'm completely locked into the Amazon ecosystem for ebooks, but at least there I know what I'm getting.
Are you truly locked in?
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
I converted all my Amazon purchased books with Calibre and now read them using a Boox Go 7 - between that and Standard Ebooks I’m probably set for life.
This is just a symptom of the broader enshittification of Amazon. Buying anything these days requires wading through a sea of low quality shit knockoffs and duplicate product entries all populated with useless reviews.
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.
There's no real point to Amazon anymore. They generally aren't cheaper, especially once you factor in shipping, the entire site is a mess, you risk getting scammed and you can't really find what you're looking for anyway.
The only area where it makes sense is speed of delivery. If you really need something in the next 24 hours they are the fastest. For just about everything else the customer experience is far better elsewhere.
Amazon doesn't have any warehouses within the country, Germany is the nearest, so everything takes a week or more to arrive.
I first starting noticing bad print on demand editions from Oxford University Press almost 20 years ago.
I buy books which are classics or longsellers usually from used book stores or at flea markets, or generally from book stores where I can inspect the books before buying.
I was excited when I opened this post, but apparently the author is complaining about this?
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.
I tend to buy hardcovers but sometimes it’s not possible. I agree it’s a sure-fire way to avoid print-on-demand.
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.
it would be nice if they told you that's what it was before you purchase it, that I agree with. I think they do it this way because if it takes too long to ship it, you might not buy it, plus with one purchase, there is usually more. I may have gotten one of those books, but I wouldn't know since I'm one of those people that doesn't care all that much for paperpack, all the books I value I try to get them in hard-cover.
if you appreciate books, you don’t buy them from amazon. that’s been true for a number of years now. of course, if someone is tight on budget and wants to get a book, I wouldn’t go at them for getting the cheapest option available, which in 99% of cases, amazon is. but for people that can afford it? no excuse. I find it to be immoral to buy from amazon. my wife and I have switched years ago: small local libraries > dussmann > amazon
Often local booksellers will have the ability to order pretty much anything in print too. Here in the Netherlands there are only a few exceptions I can't order¹ locally, and even then I can usually find them on the national Amazon alternatives (i.e., Bol.com, which sucks, but isn't nearly as evil as Amazon).
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.
If you order from your local bookstore a book which is being sold on Amazon as a PoD copy by a major publisher, what do you think happens?
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.
> If you order from your local bookstore a book which is being sold on Amazon as a PoD copy by a major publisher, what do you think happens?
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.
I strongly recommend abebooks for buying physical texts.
FWIW, they sold to Amazon in 2008.
https://techcrunch.com/2008/08/01/amazon-to-acquire-abebooks...
You're still dealing "somewhat" directly with an individual seller, who "usually" gets all the details right, and you get the edition you want.
I think it is pretty obvious. While Jack London's martin Eden is out of copyright and public domain now, if they order Penguin edition they still have to pay them some money for it. So Amazon calculated that it is cheaper to print their own. My guess they could not do this for non-public-domain books without securing rights first.
But I don’t think Amazon could “pirate” a Penguin edition like that without their consent. Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy is like you say, but they stripped it out of all mentions of a publishing house. I didn’t mind that one in fact
Honestly love them and dont see the issue at all.
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.
Agreed, the article author is just gatekeeping as far as I'm concerned.
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.
I suspect there are real quality differences between PoD books published through Amazon and these ones, which may be printed in a similar method but perhaps not the same quality of electronic formats.
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).
Print-on-demand Amazon paperback books can have great quality. It is mainly the responsibility of the author, by doing proper layout, and choosing a nice paper option. I've self-published with Amazon KDP, and am really happy with the result.
It can happen that the particular printing person on that day fucks up though.
I noticed this years ago with technical books. IIRC, Manning was the first publisher that I noticed doing it. Pages so thin that I could see the text on the reverse side as I was reading it - it drove me crazy. O'Reilly started doing the same.
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's annoying because Lulu actually has a storefront where you can buy books they print - but only in the versions, sizes, paper, and options that the author/publisher picked: https://www.lulu.com/shop
A while back I wanted to reread _Slaughterhouse 5_. I couldn't find my copy, my go-to local didn't have one in stock and would take a week or more to get it, and the library's was checked out, so I held my nose ordered one from Amazon.
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.
I miss Book Depository!
What annoys me about Amazon lately is that their books often arrive damaged.
You'd say that a company that has its origin in books would know how to ship them properly.
I think the first one I received was a copy of Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming, probably around 15 years ago. I complained about it back then. These days, all books published by O'Reilly are PoD. Quality ranges from bad to worse. It's such a shame. They used to use RepKover binding like NoStarch does.
I've found low volume books from Lulu.com to be perfectly acceptable, though. Although the hard cover does feel a bit cheap.
It seems the author is complaining that the low cost supplier for a hobby is providing low value supplies.
If the author instead went to that various used book stores around they would find treasures and probably enjoy the hobby more.
I also buy used, nothing against it, but it’s not easy to find the books that one has in mind.
I don’t have issues with print on demand books but they should be clearly labeled and Amazon should invest in increasing quality.
In fact I love the idea of high quality print on demand books that are distributed everywhere.
Another problem that could be largely solved by shattering Amazon into itty bitty pieces.
Is it really the enshittification of books, or the enshittification of printers that's responsible?
Print on demand lets you have these weird niche books. Nobody is going to pay to have 10,000 books printed and stored for a weird subject nobody cares about.
The problem is the print quality, not the idea. There’s nothing inherent forcing them to use the shittest paper on the market.
The original title is "the enshittification of". why has it been editorialized to make it less effective?
I don't know, the HN mods changed it, but I stand by my original title. If we're being finicky, one could argue that it's the book buying experience that has been enshittified, but otherwise it's a textbook case (no pun intended).
email dang and find out!
because there's literally no other way your question will be answered
Based on another HN thread today I was looking at Charles Petzold's book Code and noticed a lot of the recent reviews complain that most of the images are completely missing from the latest printings of this expensive book, rendering it worthless.
If you want to buy books nowadays, and care about quality (or about not having your money go to fund fascist billionaires), your best bets are bookshop.org for new books, and alibris.com for used books.
[flagged]
The enshittification of Amazon. Full stop. When the MBA types with excel sheets took over everything started to go downhill.
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