21–30 of 57 posts
On the other hand, I have a book from Lulu[0] and it's actually really nice. Not quite up to a "real" textbook but at least as good as a professional mass-produced paperback.
This makes me hyper sad. Seems Amazon are just making things worse with everything they do. Ever tried to buy something like a USB hub or charge cable off Amazon? Endless suspect brands you've never heard of with poor quality. Now they are normalising books with blurry cover art and hard to read text due to budget printing? Buy from a book shop.
Authors use on-demand printing from Amazon because ordering a full print run is significantly more expensive, and due to lack of demand they'd never be able to recover the costs. These kinds of books aren't promoted by a top publisher and don't have shelf space at your local bookstore. Chances are if it weren't for Amazon they wouldn't be available for purchase at all.
People don't seem to realize how absurd it is that you can have an idea for a book, type it out, upload it to Amazon, publish it on the Kindle store, and print and ship a hardcover copy to anyone in the world all in a matter of days. If you told this to an aspiring author lining up in front of publishing houses 20 years ago they would have laughed in your face because of how unbelievable it sounds. "Oh but the cover art is blurry"...seriously? Who the hell cares?
I bought two Springer books from Amazon that turned out to be print-on-demand. The font size and weight made them uncomfortable to read so I returned them. I bought another self-published book that was also print-on-demand. The larger font size made it readable although the font weight makes the footnotes look quite bad. I wish Amazon would show on the product listing that it's a print-on-demand book since they're in…
Unfortunately, nowadays, even books bought directly from Springer are print-on-demand (PoD). This isn't so bad for paperbacks, but the hardcovers tend to be glued and have very stiff spines which make the books difficult to keep open (though this has improved of late). Compare with the older Springer-produced PoD hardcovers that were Smyth-sewn and of very high quality.
I also have Andriy Burkov's Hundred-Page Machine Learning Book in pod paperback, and the author advises buying it from Amazon to avoid scammers profiting from repackaging the open source content. So again, apparently legit.
The books themselves seem of decent quality - not as good as a sewn hardback binding, but perfectly good. Interestingly they have a guid printed on the final page which I suspect is unique to the physical book.
The ones I have come from Poland. As I'm in the UK, the potential for reducing book-miles is maybe not being realised yet.
This makes me hyper sad. Seems Amazon are just making things worse with everything they do. Ever tried to buy something like a USB hub or charge cable off Amazon? Endless suspect brands you've never heard of with poor quality. Now they are normalising books with blurry cover art and hard to read text due to budget printing? Buy from a book shop.
Basically I love books but publishers are stuck in a race to the bottom with quality.
I've got a few. They're not quite as nice as 'proper' books, but the reduction in having to transport and store books before they're sold, and the fact that it means Amazon can have a much bigger inventory, means I'm fine with them. I can deal with having a lower quality book if it means I can get the book I want. The only real downside is that I'm very reluctant to buy someone else a book as a gift from Amazon. I'll…
If you extrapolate those criteria further; less nice, less transport and storage and more inventory you end up with e-books. But I absolutely understand that your personal preference is somewhere in the middle (while mine is at the end).
But for textbooks and other reference materials, a paper book (or just stapled papers) is by far the best technology available. The speed of information retrieval is unparalleled, especially once you become familiar with the layout. Flipping backwards and forwards between pages and thumbing to the correct place by memory is common. Not to mention that you have as much "screen" space as desk space, and you can even pile them on top of each other if that's not enough.
Even my copy of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is Amazon PoD
This makes me hyper sad. Seems Amazon are just making things worse with everything they do. Ever tried to buy something like a USB hub or charge cable off Amazon? Endless suspect brands you've never heard of with poor quality. Now they are normalising books with blurry cover art and hard to read text due to budget printing? Buy from a book shop.
> Buy from a book shop. Authors use on-demand printing from Amazon because ordering a full print run is significantly more expensive, and due to lack of demand they'd never be able to recover the costs. These kinds of books aren't promoted by a top publisher and don't have shelf space at your local bookstore. Chances are if it weren't for Amazon they wouldn't be available for purchase at all. People don't seem to rea…
I care.
I bought two Springer books from Amazon that turned out to be print-on-demand. The font size and weight made them uncomfortable to read so I returned them. I bought another self-published book that was also print-on-demand. The larger font size made it readable although the font weight makes the footnotes look quite bad. I wish Amazon would show on the product listing that it's a print-on-demand book since they're in…
It’s unfortunate because Amazon PoD books have been big quality - sometimes. But the person setting them up has to opt for some of the higher price features, and check fonts/print samples. (One of the advantages with PoD from Amazon is you can order boxes of your own books at cost.)
But what I never understood is how it never seemed to be a problem that over the years, the site is just filled with low quality / alibaba imports / bad products.
On a side note, the number of vendors that offer you to remove a bad review in exchange for a full refund (and you get to keep the product) is also making me lose all trust in their review system.
Product idea: use reddit to obtain 3 price point options for all items deemed of high quality (or at least that people are happy with). Say cordless vacuum cleaners and have an extension in chrome that only displays these 3 options when you look up for this item in Amazon.