beamjockey wrote about “The Worst Excuse for a Book I’ve Ever Seen.”

He compared a modern “print-on-demand” copy of a technical book with the 1912 original. OCR is clearly not ready for prime time.

The publisher

is flooding Amazon with these low quality prints and, unfortunately, many of them have the reviews associated with the original or with beter quality imprints associated with them.

Also, Jennifer Ouellette, in The Nays Have It looked at Amazon.com customer reviews of some well known science books. If you are thinking about buying a book there, don’t just count the stars. Again, you should check the reviews.