If we stop burning fossil fuels and get energy from renewable sources, the remaining hydrocarbons will probably be used for plastics, chemicals and so on. If they aren't burnt this is fine.

It also probably makes more sense to use fossil fuels for applications where density is critical such as aviation, offset with carbon capture, rather than to leave oil in the ground and synthesize jet fuel using renewable energy.

Arguably plastics are a stable, cheap and useful carbon sink and if climate is the overriding ecological priority we should be making as many as we can and recycling as few as possible.

The British noticed that V1s aimed at London tended to fall a little short. This would have been to the South and East of London since that's the direction they were coming from. They reported more hits on the North West of the city, expecting correctly that Nazi spies in Britain would let the Luftwaffe know about this.

So the range was decremented further, meaning even more hits on the southern and eastern suburbs, but statistically fewer people killed and buildings destroyed as the mean moved to less populated areas.

For public domain works, poor quality printed copies could never be criticized as crowding out better quality copies.

The bookshop would order the book from the distributor, who would get a copy ultimately from Amazon.

The books printed-on-demand by Amazon and sold directly by them are also sold via the traditional supply chain.

Most books available on PoD wouldn't be available at all without it. Not just less well known reissues but also new interesting books with limited readership, and books which larger publishers would ignore because of their own prejudices.

There are more luxury editions of classics than ever so quality-sensitive book collectors are still being catered for. And it's easier than ever to find secondhand copies of old books.

From my point of view, what you are describing is "if you're the owner of an interesting but niche work, making it available in a basic version will please a lot of people who want to buy and read it".

The alternative to most of these 'shoddy versions' from reputable publishers is simply no version at all. Not sure why the author of the article wants to enforce this on people who actually want to read these books, rather than ooh over print quality and hoard them as luxury objects.

They don't have a separate manufacturing process for mom-and-pop bookstores. Amazon do the printing and the logistics but deliver the book to the store instead of to your house so that the store can hand it to you and collect a very small amount of money.

And, for example, Greek words containing this letter should be encoded with a mix of Latin and Greek characters?