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The emergence of print-on-demand Amazon paperback books

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Re: The emergence of print-on-demand Amazon paperback books

#101

Post by palmotea »

dyauspitr wrote: post #99
palmotea wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

> 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).

Re: The emergence of print-on-demand Amazon paperback books

#102

Post by unmole »

dyauspitr wrote: post #99
palmotea wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

Re: The emergence of print-on-demand Amazon paperback books

#103

Post by unmole »

huijzer wrote: post #98
dyauspitr wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

> 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.

Re: The emergence of print-on-demand Amazon paperback books

#104

Post by gucci-on-fleek »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #76

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…

> 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.

[0]: https://tug.org/TUGboat/

Re: The emergence of print-on-demand Amazon paperback books

#105

Post by iamacyborg »

palmotea wrote: post #96
dyauspitr wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Re: The emergence of print-on-demand Amazon paperback books

#106

Post by unmole »

palmotea wrote: post #101
dyauspitr wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 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 la…

> 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.

Re: The emergence of print-on-demand Amazon paperback books

#108

Post by nswango »

georgefrowny wrote: post #14
jn6118 wrote: post #2

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 poi…

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).

Re: The emergence of print-on-demand Amazon paperback books

#109

Post by lvales »

decimalenough wrote: post #82

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.

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