I'm not saying this accounts for the entirety of the crappy print-on-demand issue you're seeing, but it might account for some: a lot of big publishers make the

I'm not saying this accounts for the entirety of the crappy print-on-demand issue you're seeing, but it might account for some: a lot of big publishers make their backstock be POD if it's old enough. For instance, at the bookstore I work at, when we order older Penguin Classics books directly from Penguin Random House, there's at least a 50% chance that we're going to get crappier POD copies from them, the publisher. We list our store's inventory on Amazon, and there have been a few times when a customer returned such books to us, angry that we sent them a POD copy, even after I explained they're actually the copies the publisher sent. That said, we sometimes order books off Amazon for a customer when they're from a publisher we're not planning on placing an order with anytime soon, and it's downright appalling how many sellers send beat up used books as "new" books, or send falling-apart books as "used" books. Can't say we've seen a lot of POD books come in that way, unless they're from tiny publishers who do most/all of their books that way.