A plague on the printing cowboys

Never waste a crisis, the saying goes – and COVID-19 has offered plenty of opportunities for the guileful to take advantage.

I suppose I am naïve, but I had not expected to see such behaviour in the world of publishing. Nonetheless, I did.

One of the better services made possible by our digital revolution are ‘print on demand’ companies; they will print you a single copy of a book – or hundreds – whenever you want. The author uploads the text, layout and format to the printer’s website. When an order appears, the printing machine whirrs and clicks and produces the book, nicely bound in the size and manner decreed by the buyer, with all the pictures and pages in the right order.

There are many such printers, including the mighty Amazon itself. And that is where the trouble started for me.

Several people had recommended that I read Daniel Defoe’s historical novel A Journal of the Plague Year. It is set during the bubonic-plague outbreak in 1665 and offers a glimpse of how society coped with an epidemic back then.

Obviously, it is out of copyright so anyone can publish it. I went to the Amazon site, found a cheap (£4.99) edition and ordered it.

It was unreadable. This is not Defoe’s fault – I mean that the production was dreadful.

When I looked more closely, I realised that it had been ‘published’ in late March after the lockdown began; that is, uploaded by some chancer to Amazon’s own printing service, in anticipation of a spike in demand. When I ordered it, Amazon both printed and posted it. Amazon did nothing wrong, but the material it was given to reproduce was hopeless. There were misprints, no page numbers, the margins were too narrow, paragraphs were jammed together, tables of numbers were misaligned and more.

I gave up after a few pages and went to the website of a proper bookshop (Waterstones); they offered me a choice of several sensible versions. I ordered the Penguin Classics edition, which of course comes with an excellent introduction, appropriate typeface and proper editing and is a pleasure to read.

My beef is not with Amazon, who refunded my money without a murmur and didn’t even want me to return the book. My complaint is with whoever set up the deal, one of the group Amazon refers to as its ‘seller partners’. Most people don’t realise that over half of what is sold on Amazon is sold not by Amazon itself but by others using it as a shop front. Amazon provides the means by which we find a supplier and pay them. Quite often, Amazon also arranges the packing and delivery – and, in my case, even the manufacturing – of the product. All this is made clear if you look carefully, but you do have to look.

One of the oldest rules is that a good guide to the quality of what you are buying is the reputation of whoever is selling it. That’s why John Lewis does so well. This rule is just as true when you’re buying online, but when you buy through Amazon it is easy to forget that it probably isn’t really Amazon you are dealing with.

That was the case with my book; a shoddy attempt to cash in on COVID-19, using the respectable mantle of Amazon to inspire confidence.

So always remember: Amazon is as much a marketplace as a shop, with all kinds of people setting up stalls under its roof. Amazon is strict and sellers must toe the line or they are thrown out, but there is always the risk that you will come up against a dodgy one before they are discovered; caveat emptor.