Yes, Irv, the original poster was making a joke about the author having a 
kickback from optical shops.
 
 > OTOH, the publishers are NOT clueless here.  They have lots
 > of clues and plenty people besides bean counters who make
 > such decisions.  They even, in a few cases, offer "Large
 > Print Books for the vision impared."  (We have a couple
 > handfulls of those at our store.  They are mostly best sellers
 > and classics.)
 
I will stand by my original statement, however.  I've been selling books for 
a short time, it's true -- only 15 years.   But in that fifteen years, I've 
seen some really hideous typesetting jobs.  Designers have chosen, for 
artistic effect, typefaces which are not designed to be used for large chunks 
of text.  Or printed the book with insufficient gutters so that you have to 
break the spine in order to read the book. 
 I've seen plenty of other books where you can see at a glance that 
the book is practically unreadable.  I don't always know exactly what is 
wrong with the typesetting, but it's clear that something is dreadfully wrong 
-- if we warn the customer to look inside before they buy, almost everyone 
goes 'ewwwwww'.
 
Bad book production turns the ordinary reader into the 'vision impaired'. 
 If people look at the open book, and the text makes their eyes swim, 
how likely are they to buy it?
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