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They're also not edited to fit the page well, nor with much care for typography or anything else. "Rivers" all over the place, weird page breaks, various format
by handrous 5y ago
They're also not edited to fit the page well, nor with much care for typography or anything else. "Rivers" all over the place, weird page breaks, various formatting errors commonly creeping in. Page numbers in e.g. an index may not match the page numbers in the book. All kinds of problems, at least with public-domain print-on-demand, which books are surely purchased more often by accident (i.e. not realizing you're buying POD junk) than on purpose, since they're usually not meaningfully cheaper than Dover or Modern Library or whatever, and even Dover puts out a much better product. They exist to trick unwary shoppers and gift-buyers. They're basically scams, in that they're relying on buyers' mistakes to make money.
- Dylan16807 5y agoJust because a book is print on demand doesn't mean it's badly formatted.
- chrisseaton 5y ago> They're also not edited to fit the page well, nor with much care for typography or anything else. What does any of this have to do with printing? Those are formatting and typesetting issues. For the same final PDF it shouldn't matter how it's printed.
- handrous 5y agoI think posters are talking (posting?) past one another here. There's the technology of print-on-demand, which can be fine, but then there's the reality of the quality level of a typical print-on-demand book on Amazon, which is not fine and is largely used to enable scammy overpriced selling of unedited Project Gutenberg texts to unwary shoppers, low-effort piracy, and letting self-publishing authors have a printed-copy option that's not really been formatted well for print (this is aside from any copy-editing issues, which crop up regardless of the format). IOW it's usually, at best, a bad product, and at worst an actual guy-selling-fake-and-stolen-Rolexes-on-the-street-corner hustle.