Math Texts Transferred to Low-Quality Digital Printing

If you ordered and paid for a hardcover edition of a book, you would almost certainly not be satisfied if you were shipped a softcover edition instead. Probably most people would also be upset if they paid full price for a new book and ended up with a book with a remainder mark. Yet several prestigious academic publishers appear to have no compunction about transferring a book from offset printing to digital printing with no change in the ISBN or list price, even though such a transfer typically causes a marked deterioration in the physical quality of the product. The purpose of this web page is to identify those math texts that have undergone such a transfer and that consequently are now only available in inferior digitally-printed versions, at least if purchased from major retailers or directly from the publishers.

As information about such texts becomes available, it will be entered into the table below. Almost all of these low-quality digital printings have a colophon at the bottom of the reverse side of the last page that says "Printed in the United States" followed by an identification code. That code is of the form "X/Y", where X identifies the book, and Y gives the ordinal numbers of the copies printed in the batch. The next-to-last column in the table below contains X.

The last column contains a link to a JPEG of the letter "e" from the digitally-printed version of the book, if it is available. If a corresponding sample from the offset-printed version is also available, that is shown for comparison purposes. If the latter is not available, a sample from a bottom-of-the-line personal laser printer (HP 1018) is shown for comparison. All JPEGs are scans from the same 1600 dpi scanner done at the same settings. The typically blurry appearance of the digitally-printed letters is not a consequence of this scanning process but is simply a reflection of the typically blurry appearance of the letters on the printed page.

Author
Title
Publisher
ISBN
Digital Colophon
Print Comparison
Kunita Stochastic Flows and Stochastic Differential Equations Cambridge 0521599253 18002LVS00002B Click to View
Serre Linear Representations of Finite Groups Springer 0387901906 57146LVS00002B Click to View
Vick Homology Theory Springer 0387941266 59694LVS00002B Click to View
Bollobas Linear Analysis Cambridge 0521655773 113300LV00001B Click to View
Cohen Cambridge Companion to Newton Cambridge 0521656966 84879LV00003B Click to View
Serre Local Fields Springer 0387904247 59694LVS00002B Click to View
Machover Set Theory, Logic and their Limitations Cambridge 0521479983 63524LVS00003B Click to View
Fleming Functions of Several Variables Springer 0387902066 27218LVS00001B Click to View
Srivastava A Course on Borel Sets Springer 0387984127 98848LV00003B Click to View
Lee Introduction to Smooth Manifolds Springer 0387954481 208638BV00003B Click to View
Lee Riemannian Manifolds: An Introduction to Curvature Springer 0387983228 1678759 Click to View
Lee Introduction to Topological Manifolds Springer 0387950265 1682640 Click to View
Granas Fixed Point Theory Springer 0387001735
Linton From Eudoxus to Einstein: A History of Mathematical Astronomy Cambridge 0521827507
Godsil Algebraic Graph Theory Springer 0387952209
Shafarevich Basic Algebraic Geometry 1: Varieties in Projective Space Springer 3540548122