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.
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 |