Tell HN: Books Printed by Amazon
I buy a lot of books from Amazon (EU). Recently, more and more of the books I received were printed by Amazon themselves with the message "Printed in Poland by Amazon Fulfillment" on the last page.
They are of decent quality, though sometimes the cover art might be lower-resolution than that of an equivalent book from a bookshop. I double checked and all of these were sold by Amazon themselves (i.e., not a marketplace seller, where I would suspect a piracy issue). The cover material is always this unpleasant matte rough-feeling paper.
Is there anything nefarious going on here? Does Amazon have permission from the publishers to distribute their books like this? The books that I received were of different publishers (Penguin, Basic Books, among others).
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] thread[1] https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/GHKDSCW2KQ3K4UU4
Most publishers make good money on their backlists, with a slow trickle of sales across a huge number of titles. Amazon and other stores don't always want to stock these titles because they take up a lot of shelf space.
Publishers may not want to put them into book stores because they may be returned if unsold, and the return process is costly. So print-on-demand (POD) makes sense for both parties.
Amazon has been running a pretty big POD operation for years for its Kindle Direct Publishing arm, so they have the infrastructure to print books for others as well. And yes, depending on the machine, the covers may not look quite as nice as the covers from offset printers.
If you're willing to chat, happy to ping you through your website!
Edit: I see on your personal website you also have a publishing co, would love to get your insight
Here's a video of the machine in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJUla8xJ5BM
I’m surprised hearing about big publishers such as Penguin using the on-demand service though. Maybe they use it to provide books which are out-of-print or which don’t sell a lot.
Given Amazon scale, I’d not be surprised if some of them are being sold by non copyright owners though.
In the past, I have received n>1 books which were sold by marketplace sellers but fulfilled by Amazon. Same inscription "Printed by Amazon", but these clearly had things wrong with them, like font issues.
I got two and they were absolute shit.
So much so that it was the first time ever I actually returned something to Amazon. From blurred cover "art" stretched from what looked like 30dpi image to godawful sans-serif font in humongous size with line spacing so tight some characters ascenders and descenders overlapped. Made my eyes bleed. Even if they paid me to read this, it still would've been a torture.
First they came for the bookstores, then they came for the publishers….
I bought another self-published book that was also print-on-demand. The larger font size made it readable although the font weight makes the footnotes look quite bad.
I wish Amazon would show on the product listing that it's a print-on-demand book since they're inferior to traditionally printed books with the equipment currently being used.
(One of the advantages with PoD from Amazon is you can order boxes of your own books at cost.)
Compare with the older Springer-produced PoD hardcovers that were Smyth-sewn and of very high quality.
The only real downside is that I'm very reluctant to buy someone else a book as a gift from Amazon. I'll go to a book store in that situation.
But for textbooks and other reference materials, a paper book (or just stapled papers) is by far the best technology available. The speed of information retrieval is unparalleled, especially once you become familiar with the layout. Flipping backwards and forwards between pages and thumbing to the correct place by memory is common. Not to mention that you have as much "screen" space as desk space, and you can even pile them on top of each other if that's not enough.
FWIW, it’s not horrible, it’s a hard cover and not horrible in quality, just not what I wanted.
In the end, I got what I wanted on eBay classifieds for barely more than the amazon book, and less than what the big book stores with 3 weeks + delivery times wanted. Not technically new, but undistinguishable.
Buy from a book shop.
Authors use on-demand printing from Amazon because ordering a full print run is significantly more expensive, and due to lack of demand they'd never be able to recover the costs. These kinds of books aren't promoted by a top publisher and don't have shelf space at your local bookstore. Chances are if it weren't for Amazon they wouldn't be available for purchase at all.
People don't seem to realize how absurd it is that you can have an idea for a book, type it out, upload it to Amazon, publish it on the Kindle store, and print and ship a hardcover copy to anyone in the world all in a matter of days. If you told this to an aspiring author lining up in front of publishing houses 20 years ago they would have laughed in your face because of how unbelievable it sounds. "Oh but the cover art is blurry"...seriously? Who the hell cares?
I care.
The lower barrier to entry for self-publishing is not an excuse for a race to the bottom on quality. I can't imagine many of these books surviving as long as, say, my battered copy of K&R C.
Basically I love books but publishers are stuck in a race to the bottom with quality.
On the other hand, I have a book from Lulu[0] and it's actually really nice. Not quite up to a "real" textbook but at least as good as a professional mass-produced paperback.
[0] https://www.lulu.com/
I also have Andriy Burkov's Hundred-Page Machine Learning Book in pod paperback, and the author advises buying it from Amazon to avoid scammers profiting from repackaging the open source content. So again, apparently legit.
The books themselves seem of decent quality - not as good as a sewn hardback binding, but perfectly good. Interestingly they have a guid printed on the final page which I suspect is unique to the physical book.
The ones I have come from Poland. As I'm in the UK, the potential for reducing book-miles is maybe not being realised yet.
[1] https://qntm.org/fiction
But what I never understood is how it never seemed to be a problem that over the years, the site is just filled with low quality / alibaba imports / bad products.
On a side note, the number of vendors that offer you to remove a bad review in exchange for a full refund (and you get to keep the product) is also making me lose all trust in their review system.
Product idea: use reddit to obtain 3 price point options for all items deemed of high quality (or at least that people are happy with). Say cordless vacuum cleaners and have an extension in chrome that only displays these 3 options when you look up for this item in Amazon.
As for blurry covers, a common mistake among self-published authors is not preserving the aspect ratio for cover art. They'll stretch an image, or use a low-resolution image. Again, this is done out of ignorance or carelessness. Major publishers know to pay attention to these details.
POD publishers like Ingram Spark also let you choose the type of paper and cover finish. They can produce good paperbacks. Maybe Amazon's POD system chooses cheaper paper by default. I'm not sure.
Material quality felt "fine" to me, but haven't really done an analysis.
I bought a book on Amazon Germany last year, 1000 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think, and as soon as I opened it I had a feeling it was a pirate copy. I even tried to find the book in a physical book store so I could compare, but didn't find it.
Just took it down from the shelf and went to the back page, and yes it's printed in Poland by Amazon Fulfillment.
I suspected it because the print looks weird, almost like a photocopy, uneven and thin and pale. The paper is like printer paper, and in general it just doesn't feel premium.
So the mystery is solved, but I feel cheated, even though the book was rubbish anyway.
Why is it still on your shelf then :)
http://www.miraclejones.com/stories/fulfillment.html
Something I learned quickly is that local bookstores & libraries will often refuse to carry books that are Print-on-Demand from Amazon. There are several other POD suppliers online and it’s really cool to compare the features and cost models across each supplier.
My Amazon POD books were nearly identical in quality to some books I printed with another provider — and as a few others have said it was magic to see how many sales I got with zero advertising.
Soooo….your mileage may vary!
I think it may be based on the author to choose what they want the quality of the cover and pages to be, at a higher book price. I bought a book that an old coworker had written (not good, very much a cash grab short book, but I was interested in POD), and the cover was an awful matte finish with really low quality pages and print quality.
I've also gotten some good quality books from them, but they're always more expensive, so I bet there's some opt-in quality tradeoffs to be made by the original publisher/author.