alt Hacker NewsThe emergence of print-on-demand Amazon paperback books
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I think the first one I received was a copy of Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming, probably around 15 years ago. I complained about it back then. These days, all books published by O'Reilly are PoD. Quality ranges from bad to worse. It's such a shame. They used to use RepKover binding like NoStarch does.
I've found low volume books from Lulu.com to be perfectly acceptable, though. Although the hard cover does feel a bit cheap.
It seems the author is complaining that the low cost supplier for a hobby is providing low value supplies.
If the author instead went to that various used book stores around they would find treasures and probably enjoy the hobby more.
I don’t have issues with print on demand books but they should be clearly labeled and Amazon should invest in increasing quality.
In fact I love the idea of high quality print on demand books that are distributed everywhere.
Another problem that could be largely solved by shattering Amazon into itty bitty pieces.
Is it really the enshittification of books, or the enshittification of printers that's responsible?
Print on demand lets you have these weird niche books. Nobody is going to pay to have 10,000 books printed and stored for a weird subject nobody cares about.
The problem is the print quality, not the idea. There’s nothing inherent forcing them to use the shittest paper on the market.
The original title is "the enshittification of". why has it been editorialized to make it less effective?
Based on another HN thread today I was looking at Charles Petzold's book Code and noticed a lot of the recent reviews complain that most of the images are completely missing from the latest printings of this expensive book, rendering it worthless.
If you want to buy books nowadays, and care about quality (or about not having your money go to fund fascist billionaires), your best bets are bookshop.org for new books, and alibris.com for used books.
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The enshittification of Amazon. Full stop. When the MBA types with excel sheets took over everything started to go downhill.
What annoys me about Amazon lately is that their books often arrive damaged.
You'd say that a company that has its origin in books would know how to ship them properly.