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So many new books on Amazon are bad quality reprints. Certain subjects depend on quality, clear illustrations. I just assumed a new book meant quality of the

So many new books on Amazon are bad quality reprints. Certain subjects depend on quality, clear illustrations. I just assumed a new book meant quality of the original, but I was wrong. Years ago, when I was learning watch repair, I bought a new copy of The Watch Repairer's Manual, by Henry Fried. Published by the American Watchmaker's Press. It wasen't cheap then either. As I was reading it, the diagrams seemed fuzzy. I thought it was just me though. I'm a first edition collector, and have a huge library. You would think I would have spotted a bad printing run. Well, I happened to buy the same book off eBay, but was published in 1973. The pages, and illustrations were crisp, and clear. I learned my lesson though. It's a clever way to sell a new book. My lesson was don't trust new book anywhere. Used, old print is fine by me. New is not better when it comes to certain books. In the back of my mind, I wondered how anyone could offer a new copy of an obscure book. Well, it's by inferior printing. There's a market for quality reprints of certain books. We like to think we made so much progress, but not when it comes to printing books. We have regressed. Pick up any magazine from the 40's through the 70's, and you will notice the quality difference. I'm not saying we need to go back to Linotype printing. Im just saying we have regressed in printing. (My grandfather was a completely color blind printer. He went his whole career never telling anyone. He was laser focused on the print quality, or "tack sharp" as he used to say. Yes--completely color blind. He would ask his coworkers, customers if the colors looked right. He would then make color adjustments. His best advice to me was moderation in everything. This was coming from a 3 pack/day smoker, eight drink minimum, with a 1/2 hose feeding his lower extremities due to plaque. He lived until 80. Crazy?)

shliachtx 9y ago
Literally why TeX exists. Donald Knuth couldn't tolerate the poor quality of digital typesetting.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- wolfi1 9y ago
  that's not entirely correct. when linotype was dumped phototypesetting was introduced. and it seems it was not possible to reintroduce the typesetting of the linotype age. DEK wanted to have a digital typesetter reproducing the same quality of linotype. if the typesetting of that time and if it was digital at all was poor quality is unbeknownst to me
sfifs 9y ago
> Certain subjects depend on quality, clear illustrations... the diagrams seemed fuzzy. I thought it was just me though. I'm a first edition collector, and have a huge library. This is exactly the kind if situation where digital hi-res screens and zoomable vector diagrams as presentation formats are immensely superior to paper print. You're a collector and hence holding on to print editions because of nostalgia. We're however hobbled from evolving high quality modern documentation by being tired to "printability" like pdfs and Tex
- jacobolus 9y ago
  The interface for reading on screens sucks. The hardware (e.g. iPads) is getting there but the software is still miserable. Hard to browse, bookmark, annotate (either in place or separately), cross-reference, cut and paste (as with scissors). Doesn’t help that most books are not available in a carefully crafted digital-native format. The people I know with the most effective research habits, even ones who get most of their material online, still make great use of note cards, white boards, marked-up printouts, and the like. For now paper is definitely preferable for reading anything but pulp novels, newspapers, and ongoing discussions. But I can imagine that changing if some people put in work on the software side in the next couple decades. Biggest pain point at the moment is probably authoring tools. If every basic textbook was filled with interactive (programmable?) diagrams, computer simulations, extra related media, links between text and video lectures, a wider variety of practice problems at varying difficulty with full listings of hints and solutions, in depth technical annotations and bibliographic links to primary sources (viewable in place) for every chapter, etc., learning from textbooks could be made much more reader-centered, with books becoming less a serial prose format and more like a tree/graph. But all that stuff takes massive amounts of work, and would require some kind of collective funding by a group laser-focused on the real-world effectiveness and quality of the output, rather than political bullshit or rent-seeking, as most current curriculum designers and textbook publishers are. Teams of volunteers like Wikipedia aren’t really able (at least that I’ve seen) to make a novice-friendly but still accurate explanation or a coherent narrative for a whole large subject.
  - huhy 9y ago
SyneRyder 9y ago
> So many new books on Amazon are bad quality reprints. Is it possible that what you'd bought was a counterfeit? Amazon apparently has a problem with knock-offs being commingled with their publisher-supplied stock. Here's the founder of No Starch Press tweeting about Amazon selling counterfeit copies of Python For Kids. The diagrams were fuzzy & pixelated (and black and white), and the paper quality was significantly inferior: https://twitter.com/billpollock/status/844030960333152256 https://twitter.com/billpollock/status/844030960333152256 There was an HN discussion about it 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13924546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13924546

shliachtx 9y ago

Literally why TeX exists. Donald Knuth couldn't tolerate the poor quality of digital typesetting.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
wolfi1 9y ago
that's not entirely correct. when linotype was dumped phototypesetting was introduced. and it seems it was not possible to reintroduce the typesetting of the linotype age. DEK wanted to have a digital typesetter reproducing the same quality of linotype. if the typesetting of that time and if it was digital at all was poor quality is unbeknownst to me

sfifs 9y ago

> Certain subjects depend on quality, clear illustrations... the diagrams seemed fuzzy. I thought it was just me though. I'm a first edition collector, and have a huge library. This is exactly the kind if situation where digital hi-res screens and zoomable vector diagrams as presentation formats are immensely superior to paper print. You're a collector and hence holding on to print editions because of nostalgia. We're however hobbled from evolving high quality modern documentation by being tired to "printability" like pdfs and Tex

jacobolus 9y ago
The interface for reading on screens sucks. The hardware (e.g. iPads) is getting there but the software is still miserable. Hard to browse, bookmark, annotate (either in place or separately), cross-reference, cut and paste (as with scissors). Doesn’t help that most books are not available in a carefully crafted digital-native format. The people I know with the most effective research habits, even ones who get most of their material online, still make great use of note cards, white boards, marked-up printouts, and the like. For now paper is definitely preferable for reading anything but pulp novels, newspapers, and ongoing discussions. But I can imagine that changing if some people put in work on the software side in the next couple decades. Biggest pain point at the moment is probably authoring tools. If every basic textbook was filled with interactive (programmable?) diagrams, computer simulations, extra related media, links between text and video lectures, a wider variety of practice problems at varying difficulty with full listings of hints and solutions, in depth technical annotations and bibliographic links to primary sources (viewable in place) for every chapter, etc., learning from textbooks could be made much more reader-centered, with books becoming less a serial prose format and more like a tree/graph. But all that stuff takes massive amounts of work, and would require some kind of collective funding by a group laser-focused on the real-world effectiveness and quality of the output, rather than political bullshit or rent-seeking, as most current curriculum designers and textbook publishers are. Teams of volunteers like Wikipedia aren’t really able (at least that I’ve seen) to make a novice-friendly but still accurate explanation or a coherent narrative for a whole large subject.
- huhy 9y ago

SyneRyder 9y ago

> So many new books on Amazon are bad quality reprints. Is it possible that what you'd bought was a counterfeit? Amazon apparently has a problem with knock-offs being commingled with their publisher-supplied stock. Here's the founder of No Starch Press tweeting about Amazon selling counterfeit copies of Python For Kids. The diagrams were fuzzy & pixelated (and black and white), and the paper quality was significantly inferior: https://twitter.com/billpollock/status/844030960333152256 https://twitter.com/billpollock/status/844030960333152256 There was an HN discussion about it 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13924546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13924546