Comment by Blackstrat

There's far less to recommend Amazon than there once was. Service quality has dropped. Their recommendation engine was better 10 years ago than it is today, e.g,. recommending an item I've already bought or items in my cart isn't a recommendation. Using the USPS for final delivery doesn't help as "Prime Delivery" can now take a week or more to arrive here. And then the postal worker will do everything in their power to cram the book in the mailbox. I've returned about half of the books that I've ordered in the last year. Consequently, I've been ordering more through the local B&N and picking it up in store. There I can see the quality and condition before deciding to keep. And I wish poor quality book publishing was limited to Amazon. It's not. I ordered a new copy of Apostol Calculus direct from Wiley. It was expensive ($300+). It turned out to be print on demand as well and of such poor quality that many equations were illegible. It was "new" but unusable and I was able to find a used copy in fine shape. Fundamentally, in my view, publishers are killing the book industry. Eliminating mass market paperback drove up the price of trade paper as well as digital. Consequently, many books become "unaffordable" from a demand perspective, i.e., many of us are unlikely to throw away $25+ for a causal airplane read. We'll acquire it used later, or borrow it from the library, if we bother to read it at all. Further, with younger generations reading physical books far less often than their parents or grandparents, they've initiated a feedback loop that doesn't end well for the industry. Amazon doesn't care. Books aren't their driver anymore. So the reader draws the short straw.