Death by Print On Demand

The end of the book as we know it

Daniel Wieser 🔥
3 min readAug 21, 2024
created with Leonardo.ai

You ever held a book in your hands?

In the past, purchasing a book was an act that carried with it a certain expectation.

The anticipation of cracking open a beautifully bound volume,

smelling the fresh ink on quality paper,

and enjoying the tactile pleasure of turning well-crafted pages.

Today, however, a disturbing trend has emerged that threatens to diminish this experience — the rise of print-on-demand (POD) publishing by online giants like Amazon.

The outcome is often a product that falls far short of the quality once associated with printed books.

Profit on Demand

Rather than holding large inventories of books, Amazon now often prints books only when an order is placed.

Major publishers, faced with shrinking profit margins and the pressures of an increasingly digital marketplace, have largely acquiesced to the print-on-demand model.

While this approach offers undeniable advantages — such as reducing waste and allowing for infinite availability of titles — it has also led to a noticeable decline in the quality of the books themselves.

Did you notice the decline of quality or am I the only one?

Death to Quality

I received books with flimsy covers, unevenly cut pages, and thin, low-grade paper that feels more like newsprint than the smooth, substantial sheets one expects from a well-made book.

Let’s be clear: The content itself stayed the same.

But books have always been more than just vehicles for text.

They are objects of art and craftsmanship.

This shift affects the overall experience of book ownership.

Where once a well-made book was a prized possession, a durable object to be passed down through generations, print-on-demand books are often disposable, unlikely to withstand the test of time.

And honestly, I don’t like it.

Commodities…

Books, once cherished as objects of beauty and durability, are increasingly becoming just another disposable commodity.

You ever hold a book in your hands?

I’m not talking about some digital ghost or the paperback trash they spit out on those factory lines today.

I’m talking about a real book, the kind that feels alive, pulsing in your hands with a story that’s more than ink on paper.

The kind that could break a window or a man’s nose.

But that’s gone now…

Just like everything else worth anything in this world.

You think you’re buying a book online, but what you’re getting is a hollowed-out corpse.
A shell.
A product.

A piece of crap that looks like it’s been slapped together by some robot on a caffeine high.

The cover’s so thin it curls up like a dead leaf, the pages are cut unevenly, and the binding — if you can even call it that — starts coming apart the second you open it.

The words inside might as well be ashes, because the whole thing is already disintegrating in your hands.

Because they don’t care if you read it.

..but did they ever do?

They don’t care about the story, or the writer, or the reader.

All they care about is churning out as many units as possible, as cheaply as possible.

The publishers, the ones who should be the guardians of literary culture, they’ve sold out too.

They’ve jumped into bed with Amazon, letting them dictate how books are made, how they’re sold, how they’re consumed.

They’ve traded quality for convenience, craftsmanship for profit.

They’re complicit in this massacre, standing by as books are butchered and bastardized.

The next generation?

They won’t know what they’ve lost, because they’ll never have had it. They’ll grow up thinking that books are supposed to be cheap, flimsy, disposable things.

They’ll never feel the weight of a real hardcover in their hands, never smell the ink, never run their fingers over the embossed title on a dust jacket. They’ll never know that a book could be a work of art, something to be cherished, something to be passed down.

We’re standing on the edge of the abyss, looking down into a future where books are nothing more than another piece of consumer trash.

This is the end.
The death of the book as we know it.

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