Life In 19x19

I had a friend with Amazon Prime order my copy, so I received it quickly for less than $7. At that price point, I'm thrilled.

That being said, as mentioned by others, there are strange kerning and line thickness issues that are not present in the source PDF.

I've created two comparison shots. On the left is the source PDf found here. On the right is the same page scanned from my book.

In the first comparison, the image quality of the right image is a function of my scanner, not the book. The point of that comparison is to show the kerning issues in the textbox that are not in the source PDF.

In the second comparison you can see the kerning in the chapter title, and the strange variation in line thickness.

HOWEVER, I'm delighted to own this book and my immense thanks to the original authors and the person who took the trouble to make it printable via Amazon!!!

For the book price, one cannot expect better printing quality. E.g., if a good printer had been chosen, there would have been transport costs from that printer to Amazon and necessarily the price must be higher. It is good to know, however, that Amazon's own printing on demand has quality problems. Provided I understand correctly that that is what is being used.

I'm going to return mine. It appears to be of lower quality than the other copies people have posted.

Typical page:

Yeah, pretty bad quality.

What's really strange is that the printing quality seems very inconsistant between diagrams inside the same page, but the diagrams themself are consistant.

It feels like the problem was the conversion between the original pdf and the printing format that is internally used by Amazon.

For exemple, diagrams 2, 3, 5 and 6 seems to be converted one way, and 1 and 4 another way.

Bill Spight wrote:Yeah, pretty bad quality.

I'd like to comment here that the CC-by-SA license on the work means that others can make printed versions. The OP made it clear that I was consulted, but you don't even have to do that. The licensing conditions are (a) attribution and (b) retain the license on the derived work.

I've made clear to some people the unhappy early history of Shape Up!, as far as dealing with the existing publishers was concerned. It is flattering that the effort has been made, nearly two decades on from the writing of the book, to bring out a hard copy version.

Supposing that the "book on shape" (kyu-level sub-board pattern matching and reifying approach done with some sort of system) still meets a demand post-AlphaGo, it would be interesting, surely, to target shapeful plays in pro go with the critical analysis bots can give. Maybe I won't write such a book (I have other fish to fry).

Charles Matthews wrote:

Bill Spight wrote:Yeah, pretty bad quality.

I'd like to comment here that the CC-by-SA license on the work means that others can make printed versions. The OP made it clear that I was consulted, but you don't even have to do that. The licensing conditions are (a) attribution and (b) retain the license on the derived work.

To be clear, my comment referred to the quality of that particular printing, not the quality of the text.

I think that Shape Up's continued popularity has shown that the publishers perhaps made something of a mistake in thinking that the text's viability had had the life squeezed out of it by other books.

Javaness2 wrote:I think that Shape Up's continued popularity has shown that the publishers perhaps made something of a mistake in thinking that the text's viability had had the life squeezed out of it by other books.

Very much "don't get me started". I have always questioned whether the go publishers in English had the needs of the game in Europe (say) clearly in mind. The market for books is (maybe "was") the 2 kyu to 2 dan player.

Before go servers, getting up to 2 kyu was a real problem for western players. A small number of books are really helpful. Then 2 dan to 5 dan is of course really tough, and books may help, but probably not if they are treated as textbooks.

I have certainly not seen any encouragement from publishers of the kind of "steady seller" book, written by amateurs for weaker amateurs, that there could be. Quite the opposite. Much of the Asian literature is derived from go journalism, which probably captures some really interesting stuff, but is more of a disposable format by its nature.

Anyway 15 years ago I had good reason to move on.

The Diagram line thickness is inconsistent in the PDF already, as I explained above, IIRC (I guess they were simply sucked from Gobase.org).
The kerning of the boxed sans-serif text is whacked in the PDF already.
The headlines seem OK in the PDF (maybe due to the fonts installed on my computer) but not in the printed book.

Interesting. That means if we "repair" that, a new version could been much cleaner?

That may be worth doing

From https://forums.online-go.com/t/shape-up ... date/24038:

bd100 wrote:The online book Shape Up! has been updated with improved grid lines and embedded fonts

—> https://cdn.online-go.com/shape_up_v1.2.pdf

Looks a LOT better now IMO.