Have you purchased a weirdly low-quality paperback book lately? This may be why.

I work as the bookstore manager for a bookstore in the Hudson Valley and one of the things that means is that I handle not only the ordering of most of our books, but the unboxing of them as well. I get to put hands (or at least eyes) on basically every book that comes into the store and, as a result, I’m well-positioned to notice trends in the quality of the physical releases heading out into the world these days. Some of them are positive trends, or at least morally-neutral late-capitalist cash-grabs like the rise in sprayed edges or the hardcover reissues of popular novels that already had a hardcover release. But in the last few weeks, I’ve noticed a significant uptick in print-on-demand paperbacks: low quality covers and paper, often poorly printed, and listed at a higher price than their regular-print brethren. Earlier this year, Joanne McNeil posted on Bluesky about something strange that happened with her then-brand-new book, Wrong Way : an Amazon order delivered a copy of the paperback-original that was a different size, on lower-quality paper, and featuring a slightly different cover. As McNeil pointed out, many consumers likely don’t know the difference between a print-on-demand book and a traditionally produced paperback, at least not at first. But once you do notice, you can’t unsee it. On the left is the print-on-demand edition of Wrong Way. On the right is the publisher-printed edition. (photo credit: Joanne McNeil) The thread on Bluesky quickly devolved into self-published writers griping about McNeil’s exhortation to not buy paperbacks from Amazon because that’s the only place they can sell their books—a flawed argument on so many levels and a fight I’m not interested in having today, but one that comes with a good point: print-on-demand is not new, nor is it unequivocally bad. Yes, most self-published books suffer for lack of an editor or paid cover designer, but the technology itself has many uses: it is an easy way to do a small print run of something, to share niche research, to reissue old books otherwise lost to time, […]

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