D&D 5E Player's Handbook Binding

[Flexor the Mighty!]

Mine looks OK so far. D&D books have usually had good bindings, especially the 1e books which are still tight to this day. Nothing I hate more than crap bindings on a game book that won't let you lay the book open on a table. 3e GURPS/2e Warhammer I'm looking at you!

 

[Paladin interrogator]

We bought ours in September and it had pages falling out within a week. My wife works at a library processing center so she took our PHB to re-glue and press it in a book press. Since then we haven't had any issues even though it gets regular use.

The bottom line is that this edition is poorly constructed. A book of this nature should be stitched not single page glued.

They are trying to save a buck with a cheaper binding process and this is an area where they shouldn't be skimping. We, as a community, would pay the extra dollar without batting an eye for well made books.

 

[Goemoe]

Month 6 and the books bindung just broke while the book itself still looks as new. It's a pity.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Yeah, it's no big deal.
I'm more than willing to come down on WotC for mistakes and flaws. But 100% perfect products is impossible. There's always some errors.

When you make ten thousand copies of something there will be bum copies. Even a 1% error rate means a hundred bad copies. We don't know the size of the print run, but it could be in the 25-100k range. That might mean 200-1000 inferior copies.

Those shouldn't really be making it to the shelves, though. I don't think it's WotC's direct responsibility - the printer and the actual retailers should be preventing it, but it does reflect rather poorly on them. I mean, when you look at other books in this price range, with a similar (or even superior) standard of printing, do you see similar errors? I was looking through a bunch of The World of Ice an Fire books at some bookshops this Christmas, and whilst many had covers which had been damaged (I mean, really minor, but I'm picky), all the interiors were identical and fine.

Similarly, of my fairly vast collection of RPG hardbacks and other colour A4 hardbacks from the last twenty-five years, I can honestly say that zero have any of the errors described here (too much glue in various places, smeared text, screwed-up printing, pages falling out within months, spines breaking within months, or 4E's smudgy deal).

Softbacks are another story entirely!

They are trying to save a buck with a cheaper binding process and this is an area where they shouldn't be skimping. We, as a community, would pay the extra dollar without batting an eye for well made books.

Indeed. I don't think the long-term value of how good a well-made book makes you feel is being considered here. When I open an RPG book I've been using for 5+ years and it's still all in great order, that gives me distinctly warm feeling towards both the company responsible for it and the game it's for, makes me think "this is a long-term thing".

 

[Jester David]

Those shouldn't really be making it to the shelves, though. I don't think it's WotC's direct responsibility - the printer and the actual retailers should be preventing it, but it does reflect rather poorly on them. I mean, when you look at other books in this price range, with a similar (or even superior) standard of printing, do you see similar errors? I was looking through a bunch of The World of Ice an Fire books at some bookshops this Christmas, and whilst many had covers which had been damaged (I mean, really minor, but I'm picky), all the interiors were identical and fine.

Similarly, of my fairly vast collection of RPG hardbacks and other colour A4 hardbacks from the last twenty-five years, I can honestly say that zero have any of the errors described here (too much glue in various places, smeared text, screwed-up printing, pages falling out within months, spines breaking within months, or 4E's smudgy deal).

And how should they have caught this quality problem exactly? Opened up every single PHB and wiggled it around for a minute while tugging on the pages?
We're talking a 250,000 copies print run. Someone has to do that. Assuming a full 40 hour workweek and only two seconds spent checking each book, it would take someone a full 6 weeks to check every single copy.

QA should only be expected to check some copies. One in a hundred, if not one in a thousand. And if a problem occurs that are a smaller ratio they might slip by.
I've seen lots of errors with WotC products. I've seen a few where the inside was upside down. A few with blurry printing. Those slipped by during 3e/4e and were a lot more obvious errors than pages becoming loose after regular use.

Softbacks are another story entirely!

That's the catch, WotC uses the same method used in softcover books, where loose pages are glued into the spine.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

And how should they have caught this quality problem exactly? Opened up every single PHB and wiggled it around for a minute while tugging on the pages?

We're talking a 250,000 copies print run. Someone has to do that. Assuming a full 40 hour workweek and only two seconds spent checking each book, it would take someone a full 6 weeks to check every single copy.

QA should only be expected to check some copies. One in a hundred, if not one in a thousand. And if a problem occurs that are a smaller ratio they might slip by.

I've seen lots of errors with WotC products. I've seen a few where the inside was upside down. A few with blurry printing. Those slipped by during 3e/4e and were a lot more obvious errors than pages becoming loose after regular use.

I don't need to tell you "how exactly" they should have checked because it's immaterial. Clearly, with books that get published, there is some sort of accepted checking methodology, and some sort of standard of production. I say clearly, because I own dozens of similar books, and have seen probably thousands more (I work in a library, for goodness sake), and they don't have these problems.

So there was a screw-up.

And the buck stops with WotC. Whether it was a poor choice of supplier, whether they decided to cut corners on QA, hell, even if it was bad luck (which as you illustrate below, it was note), it stops with them. Other people who sell vast numbers of colour hardbacks manage to deal with the problem.

That's the catch, WotC uses the same method used in softcover books, where loose pages are glued into the spine.

It's not a "catch", though, it's an example of how WotC are actually directly responsible for part of this problem, and why it reflects badly on them. They made that decision, which probably saved them pennies per copy, and it resulted in a poorer-quality product being delivered to their customers.

That's a bad decision with hobbyists, frankly.

 

[Jester David]

I don't need to tell you "how exactly" they should have checked because it's immaterial. Clearly, with books that get published, there is some sort of accepted checking methodology, and some sort of standard of production. I say clearly, because I own dozens of similar books, and have seen probably thousands more (I work in a library, for goodness sake), and they don't have these problems.

So there was a screw-up.

And the buck stops with WotC. Whether it was a poor choice of supplier, whether they decided to cut corners on QA, hell, even if it was bad luck (which as you illustrate below, it was note), it stops with them. Other people who sell vast numbers of colour hardbacks manage to deal with the problem.

The onus is on WotC to *reasonably* check. There will always be some margin of error, some acceptable number if defects.
The PHB run was larger than normal and done quickly. The number of bad PHBs is likely a staggeringly small percentage. But even if only 0.01% of the books are defective (one in 10,000) that's still 2500 bad books. And a lot of those people are going to come online and complain, making the problem seem worse.
WotC also has to trust the printer to some extent, as they need to do their job. It's harder to entirely blame WotC if the printer used an expired batch of glue or skimped on QA.
The D&D team isn't that huge. Assuming everyone who worked on D&D went down to they warehouse and checked one out of every hundred books for ten minutes, it would still take three days to go through the entire print run. And no company is going to do that. It's cheaper to replace returned copies.

It's not a "catch", though, it's an example of how WotC are actually directly responsible for part of this problem, and why it reflects badly on them. They made that decision, which probably saved them pennies per copy, and it resulted in a poorer-quality product being delivered to their customers.

That's a bad decision with hobbyists, frankly.

It's the same method they've been using for books since 3e.

 

[seebs]

I think the point here is that the early print run had pretty frequent problems, which should have been caught by QA because a whole lot of the books have that problem. And I absolutely think there's a problem with these books there hasn't been with others, because I've been buying D&D hardcovers for 30 years and never in that time seen people complaining about them. (I admit, I have one previous-edition book with binding problems, but it's a 1e Unearthed Arcana and I don't even think the binding was bad, I just think it's an old book that got used a lot.)

So this isn't remotely within normal error rates. 0.01% would be a very high error rate, and the information I've seen so far leads me to suspect that the rate of problems with that first print run is quite a bit higher.

Speaking of which, mine's doing it now, some pages are starting to detach. So I gotta find out how to get this fixed-or-replaced.

 

[SkidAce]

1st edition UA was notorious for falling apart, otherwise I'm with you.

 

[seebs]

1st edition UA was notorious for falling apart, otherwise I'm with you.

Well, that would explain it, since that's the only one I've had fail.

So basically, I've been doing hardcover RPG books across multiple systems for 30 years, and in all that time I've had two books fail on me, and they were both books that had a rep for failing. I think that's really compelling evidence that there is a problem here which should have been caught in QA.