That's great! A smoking gun.

As to binding: I'm no expert either, but I think we might both be surprised at how few paperbacks are sewn -- even ones that appear to have visible signatures. A couple of years ago, a hundred-page chunk came out of a Cambridge University Press paperback that I've been using since the early nineties as a working and teaching copy. It appears to have signatures, though it's also obviously glued to the paper cover. I took it to the preservation department in our library, and was told, to my surprise, that it's not sewn at all -- it's a "notched double-fan adhesive" binding, which is apparently very, very common. So the signatures are real, but there's nothing but the notching process and the strip of glue holding the signatures to each other.

This also means I can't just find a local hand bookbinder to repair it: I'd have to send it to a shop with the right machine, and they'd charge me an arm and a leg....

posted by markell at 2:38 pm (EST) on Jun 17, 2008

Hi -- glad to know I'm not alone in caring about digital printing!

There are actually a couple of different versions of digital printing, as I understand it. There are the "print-on-demand" books, often digital scans of traditionally printed pages, which are then printed with industrial laser-printers, often on bright white stock, and bound with cheaper cardstock than traditional books. These are the worst, from my point of view: ugly and hard to read. The presses will respond -- rightly -- that this is a better alternative than letting these books fall completely out of print. (They'll often use this technique with books that sell a very small but steady number of copies per year, on the grounds that they can't afford to print and warehouse a fifty-year supply of such books, but want to keep them available.) Less offensive but also more insidious are books that are printed digitally in their first release. These will typically have all the same materials as traditional books, so the paper and binding will be indistinguishable. Editors have argued to me that the type is perfectly clear in these books, but I've found that it varies from acceptable to crummy. They then insist that it will improve with the technology, and they're probably right. (I don't think the technology is the problem; the problem is the people buying and using the technology, who sometimes do and sometimes don't care about the quality of the objects they're making.)

And you're absolutely right: there MUST be a clear way of signaling the difference between the original versions of books and their digital replacements. I don't know whether a new ISBN is necessary, but some statement on the copyright page, at least, seems warranted. Some presses already do this; Cambridge, I think, says "Converted to digital printing 2005" or something like that. But at the very least, I want to be able to email a used bookseller to ask whether the copy they're offering for sale is digitally printed or not, and now the only reliable way I have to do that is to say: "does it look like it was printed by a fax machine?"

What's to be done? I'm not sure. Keep complaining. Complain to your editor, if you have one. Let presses know that it's worth your time and money to seek out a secondhand copy from an old printing rather than buy the cheap reproductions they're offering for sale...

posted by markell at 9:19 am (EST) on Jun 17, 2008

Hello, was just looking at your page as I just finished the Ferreiros history of set theory and you also have it listed. (Mine is a library copy--I'm going over to the Dark Side and starting to list things I read but don't own except in the Library in My Mind.) Anyway, glad to see you have a history of math tag; I just might refer to it in the future for more ideas of things to read! Also, wrt your review of Life of Pi--I have read neither Life of Pi nor Perelandria but for me floating islands usually hearken back to Gulliver's Travels.

Have a good day!

posted by chellerystick at 10:37 pm (EST) on Jan 19, 2008