quality issues

My revised copy of Think Like a Teacher arrived from Amazon—the copy with the two typos having been corrected. I first noticed that the spine of this copy had a nasty dent in it, meaning the package was probably bent in half during shipping. I then opened the book to flip through it, and I noticed something interesting about the gutter, i.e., the two inner margins where the left and right pages plunge into the book's spine. The left-hand margin, in the gutter, tended to be much thinner than the right-hand margin. Very disturbing.

And then page 13 fell out.

Page 13, which has page 14 on its back, just fell right out with no prompting at all.

Right now, what all of this means to me is that Amazon's print-on-demand quality is not very impressive, to put it politely. Even though the cover quality of the printed-in-Korea book is a bit inferior, the Korean version is, overall, the better book, probably because an actual human being worked on it from stem to stern, even giving the book its proper—and very readable—spine text. Shipping my book from Korea will be a pain in the wallet if you're in America (or Europe) and want a copy, but at this point, I think I'd rather give you a Korea-made copy of my book than an Amazon-made one.

I'll check my PDF previewer on Amazon again to see whether I missed something when I initially uploaded the PDF. Maybe there was a misalignment that I failed to catch, resulting in the skewed-looking gutter. As for the page falling out... I don't have any control over that, and while I could probably ask Amazon to send me another copy for free (or to give me a refund), I have to wonder whether that would be worth it. Besides, I looked at a book-repair video on YouTube for how to reinsert a fallen page, and I put the page back into the book.

I had similar issues with Water from a Skull in 2006: one major flaw with print-on-demand is the sometimes-shoddy quality of the hard copies. With Water from a Skull, I'd say at least 30-40% of the copies had problems like loose bindings, wayward pages, and uneven inking. Very frustrating. That's an argument in favor of e-books and even traditional publishing, the latter offering a near-guarantee of high quality. Amazon does offer a hardcover option; I haven't tried that one yet, but I might out of curiosity. Maybe the Amazon hardcover will be of decent quality. Is there anyone who does print-on-demand well?

Oh, man... I just typed "poor print-on-demand quality" into the YouTube search engine, and a whole host of videos sprang up. More videos I probably should've watched long ago, including some vids about avoiding Teespring, which is the company I'm using for my tee shirts. Teespring has done me wrong several times already. I really should have watched these cautionary videos long ago.

Here's that uneven gutter: