Continuing the recent topic regarding the ubiquity of print-on-demand books on Amazon…
Why can’t they put out quality products? Why must every print-on-demand book have typos, weird font, tiny font, blurred font, missing pages, etc.? I recently saw a print-on-demand copy of Mrs. Dalloway. The paragraphs were spaced apart e-mail style, and it used Comic Sans font. Who thought that was a good idea? If you’re a business that prints books, why not do it well? Don’t they have people working there that realize that they are putting forth a shitty product?
Also, is there a print-on-demand company that exists that actually produces good-looking books?
by Smathwack
12 Comments
They’re not all that bad. But it is very democratized with a very low barrier to entry. Literally anyone can publish a POD on Amazon.
I’m with Podium, a publisher that puts out high quality POD books. Aethon books is another. There are quite a few.
Is there any reason to buy a POD book for something that has had a legit print run? Like there are tons of well made copies of _Mrs. Dalloway_ circulating around out there.
It’s the democratization. Traditional publishers are not exempt though. I edited a book several years ago (a collection of technical articles) with two coworkers and the only line Springer added had two of three editor’s names misspelled 😂
Because if you put the proper work and quality control into POD that is necessary for all this, then each copy would cost 30+ bucks to produce and the end consumer would have to pay over 50 bucks (which they won’t, so there’s no incentive there).
As someone currently working on a layout project for an RPG book, it’s a bunch of work. And I imagine people wanting to just crap out content mill type work, way easier/cheaper/faster to not worry about layout/editing/proofing etc.
Because anyone can print their book on demand and they don’t always put the work in to properly edit and format their work before publishing.
POD is just a production process. Unlike traditional printing, where copies are made before hand with an estimation of demand and stored in warehouses, POD is printed digitally, basically on a printer of lower quality but with the capacity to do one or two copies when a customer orders. No need to use up warehouse space. Traditional printers are too large to do this and it makes no sense. Big publishers have titles in the POD program and the interiors are good because they’ve created a quality file.
So while I’d like to blame Amazon, POD interior file quality is up to the publisher supplied file.
Because publishers pay copyeditors, graphic designers, and layout designers. Neighbor Joe That Wrote A Book just used Word and Publisher and sent it to Lulu dot com.
That said, there is a lot of corner cutting on basic copyediting even among big 5 publishing houses now. Lots of typos and nonsense that should have been caught being printed.
Because nobody is being paid to ensure quality. If you want a professional product, buy from a professional supplier
I’ve had some decent luck with niche academic books but those were quite expensive. If it’s something widely available I guess margins are low and they can’t afford to get it right.
I’m not going to say that the gatekeeping effect of mass-production making things affordable always produces “correct” outcomes, but there’s going to be at least *some* correlation between “This book is manufactured in a garbage way” and “Nobody who has the resources to produce high-quality books wants to use those resources on a book whose *content* is garbage.”
Usually POD is self-published and often self-edited by the author. My experience with writing and publishing is that the author has the option to just submit their document and that’s it for basically free. Or, they can work with an editor to do layout and such for a fee, or for another fee get further editing to address punctuation, spacing, etc. And, for yet another fee they can get full editing where someone actually gives them feedback on the book/story and flow, etc. So, when you see really shitty quality it’s probably because the author wasn’t willing or able to put any money into the publication of their book.