the Amazon hard copy of the 2026 edition of Think Like a Teacher

The Amazon hard copy of my book arrived at the lobby of my building yesterday, and I picked it up just a few minutes ago. Click on the pics to increase their clarity and resolution.

locally printed 2026 copy, 2022 copy, Amazon (still in package, my info mosaicked)

all is revealed (slight order change, L to R: 2022 copy, locally printed copy, Amazon copy)

I just flipped through the newest book, and it looks good. I'll need to read through all of my copies page by page, but for the moment, I'm ecstatic. Everything looks to be in place in terms of images and text formatting. There's some slight page-to-page unevenness with some of the text alignment, but that can't be helped as long as the word processor is set to prevent widows and orphans. And there are risks that come with turning off that setting, too. Damned if you do, etc. I'm not going to worry too much about that particular problem.

So in the bottom photo, the leftmost and middle books are both locally printed, therefore both are in the B5 metric format (176 × 250 mm, or 6.9" × 9.8") favored in Korea. The rightmost book, from Amazon, is a US-standard 6" × 9", one of the print sizes offered by Amazon for people self-publishing print-on-demand paperbacks. The perfect-binding quality of the Amazon book seems about the same as the Korean book; the major difference is in the feel of the respective covers. The locally printed Korean version looks glossy, but it was printed by a color printer. When you run your fingers over the surface, you can feel the bumps of the inked parts, so despite the generally good quality, the book's cover has a wee bit of a laser-printed feel to it. The Amazon copy, by contrast, feels perfectly smooth, the way an American paperback should. The only real hint of cheapness is the line along the spine that indicates the manuscript had been tightly clamped together as the padding compound (glue) was applied.

And luckily, this time, the Amazon copy seems to be holding together well. In 2022, when I received a hard copy from Amazon, the book was much thinner because it was an English-only manuscript. The Amazon-printed hard-copy version was small at 6" × 9" and very thin—so thin that Amazon's on-site cover-design program wouldn't allow me to write any spine text. As a result, I hate the 2022 Amazon paperback version, which is what prompted me to have the book printed locally four years ago. The Korean print shop had no trouble adding my spine design, even to such a small book. Now, this 2026 edition is twice as thick, so Amazon had room for spine text, and the book is thick enough that Amazon was able to add plenty of padding compound to the perfect binding. As a result, the new book holds together well; no pages are falling out. With every hard copy of the 2022 book I'd ordered, the pages would always fall out, and I assumed that this meant Amazon's printer was shitty. Theoretically, it still might be shitty, but now, I think I know why: Too thin of a book means not enough padding compound for the binding, leading to loose pages that fall out. Any book I want printed via Amazon, from now on, should have at least 150 pages.

. . . 

Okay, I paused a bit to look through the text formatting more closely, and there were some spacing problems with the Korean-language manuscript. I can't fix those in the locally printed copies of my book (which I'll simply be giving away as gifts, anyway), but I can fix the problem for the Amazon copies simply by redoing the MS Word manuscript, printing to PDF, then re-uploading the PDF. Amazon automatically institutes the book-content changes, which appear in anywhere from a few minutes to 24 or so hours. All in all, there's nothing upsetting to report. From this point on, any mistakes remaining in these versions of the book are my responsibility. And what mistakes I saw did not constitute a major tragedy—they're more like a minor annoyance that doesn't affect readability. Right: I've got some editing and re-uploading to do. Second time's a charm, I hope.