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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

#41

Post by mrweasel »

cmiles8 wrote: post #38

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 BE…

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.

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

#42

Post by bhickey »

sevenseacat wrote: post #34
nbernard wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

#43

Post by cmiles8 »

mrweasel wrote: post #41
cmiles8 wrote: post #38

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 BE…

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.

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

#44

Post by pastor_williams »

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.

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

#45

Post by defrost »

bhickey wrote: post #42
sevenseacat wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.
~ Bertie: https://russell-j.com/smart_r366/r366g_e1279.html

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

#46

Post by WillAdams »

g947o wrote: post #26

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 Am…

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.

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

#47

Post by ahartmetz »

toofy wrote: post #20
GeoSys wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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 :)

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

#49

Post by nbernard »

sevenseacat wrote: post #34
nbernard wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

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

#50

Post by beezle »

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.

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