Terrible textbook printing quality

Zorba

I have been plagued with bad quality printing in textbooks, so many different publishers with a quality of printing that can only be described as ****, and it is doing my head in.

If you're familiar with Landau & Lifshitz series of books, to my knowledge they are only published by Butterworth & Heineman, I have vol. 1,2,3 & 5A and in all of them except vol.1 the quality is absolutely abysmal. And I was lucky with vol.1 because a copy that my friend has is missing half of some of the pages!

Another example is my copy of baby Rudin from McGraw-Hill. I have this for at most 1.5 years and it's at the stage now where its difficult to read some of the pages, because the letters are getting so worn away.

Another example Spivak's Calculus on Manifolds. I can't remember the publisher I think it was Breinman or something like that, again the quality is starting to get rubbish too.

Halmos' Naive set theory from Springer, again terrible quality printing.

So my question is, has anyone else noticed this, or am I just particularly unlucky in getting bad textbooks? And if its the former, then why are there so many maths textbooks of really crappy quality printing out there?

Daverz

I have a copy of L&L, Quantum Mechanics that I can't even give away because it's unreadable. The fine print -- and there's a lot of it -- is all smeared.

If you plan on buying any books in this series, look for the oldest copies you can find.