Reddit – Dive into anything

This isn’t revelation to some of you, but KDP print quality can be unpredictable. I did a few rounds of proofs to get cover and spine to look excellent, published the book, and come to find out that some of purchased copies (people in another city) are slightly to moderately off. On one, for example, the spine / cover text is ~3-4 photoshop nudges to the left. This is not a trivial amount and kept the spine from centering (too much space on the right side) and kept cover text from being right of crease. Alignment can vary somewhat at same printer or different printers in other states, regardless of what the “Print Preview” looks like. However, the local copies I ordered, at the same printer as the “Proofs” (Illinois), did turn out pretty close to the proof copies (one nudge off maybe), so I didn’t have any local issues with the few ones I reviewed. Copy out of Florida printer looked bad.

Just FYI. Print on-demand is generally decent quality but even if you have excellent attention to detail you can’t guarantee that everything will turn out symmetrical.

I looked at my bookshelf and it is actually not uncommon for spine not to be centered on books (and sometimes in an obviously not ideal way). Looks like some variation is something we just have to deal with.