[lastangryman]

This makes me hyper sad. Seems Amazon are just making things worse with everything they do. Ever tried to buy something like a USB hub or charge cable off Amazon? Endless suspect brands you've never heard of with poor quality. Now they are normalising books with blurry cover art and hard to read text due to budget printing?

Buy from a book shop.

[paxys]

> 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?

[KingOfCoders]

`"Oh but the cover art is blurry"...seriously? Who the hell cares?`

I care.

[ljm]

The books themselves feel a bit flimsy though, compared to well-printed books that have a sturdier feel. They still cost £30+ each and the quality of the finished product doesn't really match up with the price. And we're not just talking about indie self-publishers, I've noticed a drop in print quality from PragProg, Packt and O'Reilly too. For a while I thought this was just Amazon shipping shit quality material until Waterstones and Bookshop were sending them too.

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.

[badcppdev]

I've bought books from book shops recently which were of pretty abysmal quality. With paperbacks publishers seem to do a decent run and then any reprints are closer to photocopy quality. Often the front cover is missing some of the edges (as in the design has been enlarged and then cropped to fit the standard size).

Basically I love books but publishers are stuck in a race to the bottom with quality.

[jjice]

Oh man I wish I could buy more from a book store. The selection is always so bare around me and there is never a single software book in sight, which are the kind of books I read most often. Ebay ends up being the champion for me.