Comment by AlotOfReading
7 days ago
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.
> 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/
I don't believe that even a high end home/office printer can produce better quality prints than the best offset lithography practices.
One reason that offset lithography has better quality is because of the ink, which can be mixed for a specific print job (called spot colors). Regular CMYK printing cannot achieve the color space that spot colors can.
Another reason is that typical offset lithography processes produce images with 2400 DPI, and it can go even higher than that. The highest DPI I've seen on a inkjet printer was 1200.
Digital printers, as in the fancy inkjets used to print at scale, can also use spot colors and I wouldn't be surprised if they could do more than 2400 DPI. They are giant machines that cost millions of dollars.
> I don't believe that even a high end home/office printer can produce better quality prints than the best offset lithography practices.
Sure, but not many products are printed using the best offset lithography practices, most are just using whatever's cheapest.
> One reason that offset lithography has better quality is because of the ink, which can be mixed for a specific print job (called spot colors). Regular CMYK printing cannot achieve the color space that spot colors can.
Yeah, spot colours are pretty cool, but my impression was that they tended to be used in things like packaging or books with hundreds of thousands of copies printed, not things that you could conceivably replace with with POD. Or am I mistaken here and spot colours are more widely used than I thought?
> Another reason is that typical offset lithography processes produce images with 2400 DPI, and it can go even higher than that.
Wouldn't that only be useful for greyscale though? I doubt that you could get good enough registration for 2400 DPI to be useful with multiple plates. Or is registration precise enough these days?
> The highest DPI I've seen on a inkjet printer was 1200.
These printers claim to be able to print at 2400 DPI [0] [1], but I'm pretty skeptical that the quality would actually be that good.
[0]: https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/p/pixma-ip8720#tech-spec-data
[1]: https://www.brother-usa.com/products/hll9410cdn#Print
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
1 reply →
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).
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.
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.