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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, and write a low stars review explaining the problem. Returns alone don't hurt future sales of identical items.
No matter, never mind.
And aggregated over all the books that use print on demand, the editors will notice.
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 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.
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 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)
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
These days it's hard to even get a proper book to read.
Sadly, I'm completely locked into the Amazon ecosystem for ebooks, but at least there I know what I'm getting.
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 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!
Tbh i've given up on dead tree books with the lone exception of a few hard covers because ... space the final frontier.
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."
https://techcrunch.com/2008/08/01/amazon-to-acquire-abebooks...
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.
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
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.
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.
In fact I love the idea of high quality print on demand books that are distributed everywhere.