I tried buying a few reissued historical mathematics books published by Chelsea (now owned by the AMS) and I could have gotten a better output by taking the Internet Archive’s scan to my local copy shop. I quickly returned them and looked online for a used original.

It makes me also not want to buy recent editions of e.g. Springer mathematics books: the technical content may be great, but the binding falls off and the figures all look like crap. It’s a hard choice whether to buy a used 15 year old copy with various technical errors sprinkled throughout, or a poorly made recent edition with corrections and an extra chapter or two.

Producer prices for printing have long been increasing much quicker than general inflation for a long time, so either lower quality or higher prices for the end product is a natural consequence.

Those kind of services do make very small print runs possible at lower prices than would be the case for traditional printing at the same time (because they have lower fixed and higher per-unit costs than traditional printing), but they don't represent a reduction in overall printing costs.

Is it too much to ask to name actual services that meet the description given? That is:

> print-your-own support and produce good binding on quality paper at good prices

I know it's a bit subjective, but I want to know, which services do that?

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?)

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

There was an HN discussion about it 6 months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13924546

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

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.

Your other points I think are important, but really more related to teaching materials and textbooks than journal articles. Projects like nanohub are doing interesting work in this area imo.

What to me would sound less unlikely (and I am totally on the outside of all of this), if PIs take into account editor's interests and preferences -- that is, if you know that editor is interested in topic A (say, oxygen on exoplanets) you might lean in that direction with the paper you hope to publish there (e.g., in abstract / intro / conclusion stress how your research supports existence or lack thereof of oxygen). Also not impossible to know if an issue is dedicated to a specific grand theme, so articles on that have a significantly higher acceptance chance.

Whether this is 100% kosher or not can be debated, but this is far, far off from agreements that a journal will publish whatever a specific researcher writes.

If you need anecdotal examples, I'm sure we can provide some :)

If you're a PI on a big project or heading a big group, it's routine business to meet journal editors, invite them to your lab and reach publication agreements before writing your paper.

Obviously the paper will still go to review. But even that is already a big hurdle you have bypassed. In the big 3 journals, it's equally tough to get to review than to pass reviews once there. Plus, with direct contact to the editor, it's easier to get your paper reviewed by friendlier peers and/or influence ultimate editorial decisions.