I can't help you I'm afraid but I was recently comparing a new printing of a Pearson textbook with the same one from 5 years ago and the difference was shocking. I've also seen some bad printing quality from Routledge as well but that's been hit and miss for years in my experience.

Have you complained to the company themselves? What did they say?

Can’t really see any agency helping, it’s a book really - if it’s readable and such it’s probably fit for purpose.

But blurry content and such I’d be complaining to the retailer/publisher

I've had the same with Routledge. I ordered five books, three of which were poor print on demand, two were good quality.

I contacted Pearson over the book. Waiting for their reply.

Springer seems have maintained their paper and binding quality but (for mathematics, the field I know about) their typesetting is all done in LaTeX with its standard thin and spidery fonts.

I have no idea about the blurriness, but the price of paper has gone up a lot since the pandemic. If the paper is of worse quality maybe that is affecting the pictures?

Good paper is getting incredibly expensive, leading publishers to cut corners. Doesn't matter how good your printing process is if the paper you're putting it down on is shit.

I've noticed it even over in the states. It's probably even worse in the UK with Brexit and all that.

I've heard y'all's environmental agency isn't even noting, much less fining violations anymore, for example.

I can’t speak on books specifically, but I work in a US office that’s had a lot of paper quality issues in our publishing department that sound similar. We can’t get the quality paper we need in the amount of stock we’re needing it for. And if the paper is in stock, it’s either above our budget or there’s another company with higher priority that’s getting first dibs on it. What we are able to publish doesn’t look as good as it used to from all the compromises. Friends in Canada have similar complaints on their paper and wood products.

Might be a universal paper industry thing at the moment.

Haven't thought about Brexit, but it could be a factor. Good point.

I don't know about consumer protection, but I have noticed something similar in commercial books, mostly fiction in terms of "readability." The print seems lighter - more dark gray than black - the type is smaller as if they're trying to save on paper, and sometimes the paper quality is thinner.

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It sounds like you misunderstand how bookselling works.

Buying books from a different retailer isn't going to help. It is the publisher who contracts a printer. The publisher is what matters here, buying something off Waterstones rather than Amazon is not really relevant. Amazon will have more junk most likely but it isn't much of a guarantee either way.

I think the quality is going downhill because the publication "market" is mostly moving towards online only publishing. So it might be a by-product of the bigger changes in academic publishing. A lot of academic publishing houses have outsourced most of their publishing processes to whoever is cheapest.

Fair enough. I thought thag the publisher cut a deal with Amazon so Amazon ca print on deman the books from that publisher, and ordering from a different retailer they may have versions of the book from a different printer. I might be wrong.