It's spurred on by my recent acquisition of Empire of Storms, the fifth book in the Throne of Glass series. The book is a whopping 693 pages. And yet it only takes up about half the space as Queen of Shadows, which was 648 pages.
Now, in theory, I don't mind when publishers use thinner paper to make the book smaller. But I take issue with that Bloomsbury USA did for a couple reasons.
1) This book is a fucking brick. It's actually heavier than some of my college textbooks. I could probably use it as a murder weapon (not that I would fyi. I feel like I need to say that).
And more importantly...
2) My copy came damaged.
Okay. So you might say, "Hey Christina. That can happen with any book." And you would be correct. But my copy was damaged in more than one place, in more than one way. I paid full price by ordering a signed copy. And it was damaged.
And these problems did not happen in shipping.
Take Exhibits A & B:
Exhibit A is on page 310. There was a fold and tear at the top of the page.
Exhibit B... I don't even. Pages 101-104 are not bound.
So my issues stem from this: Bloomsbury says they used thinner paper (seriously it's so thin it's like bible paper) to save on space. But obviously they skimped on paper quality to save money. And you know what? That's just not cool. Other publishers have taken care to use a high enough quality paper when they print on thinner pages to safe space. See: Winter, published by Macmillan.
This is unacceptable. My signed copy came damaged from the printing. I get that things can happen in printing. And maybe it's a fluke. But both of these problems pretty obviously seem to be because the paper is just too damned thin. The book isn't much longer than ACOMAF of Queen of Shadows.
So I'm here to say that if it's a choice between a big and fat book or a thinner book with shitty paper, I will take the fat book please.
Have you ever had problems with book paper that was just too damned thin?
No comments:
Post a Comment