POD seems to give up some of the main exclusive features that remain to physical books: high quality of layout, printing, binding, etc. If I'm just gonna get a poor quality physical book out of the deal, 9 times out of 10 I'm gonna just go with an ebook instead.
i work for a POD manufacturer and I have to tell you, for a very large segment of the printing industry, the last 12-24 months have seen a shift where POD may have higher quality standards than traditional offset. inclusion of full color full bleed printing, etc... and the quality is there. are all POD providers doing this? no. but the standard is being set very high.
Some of the printers are very nice quality (we got a couple of POD in the mail recently), and yes, a majority of the early ones were horrible. Layout is a function of format, but it looks like a couple of the companies have the binding / paper / print quality worked out.
Don't most non-POD books these days have a low-quality binding anyway? That's the biggest reason I buy so many fewer books now than 15 years ago: I feel like I'm getting extruded book product.
