First of all, if you feel that you need a replacement book, contact me privately via the website, and we can arrange for you to ship your book back, and I will replace it.
Now, regarding the problem, writ-large:
It's definitely something that troubles and angers me and I've had a few discussions with the printer already. I've had reports of this problem on about 30 books, and some people have even sent me their books to show me, themselves.
Thirty books out of @1600 sold is less than a 2% failure rate, but still... every one of the people in that 2% is understandably unhappy and wants a replacement. And as fate would have it, many of these replacements have to go overseas, so each one ends up costing a bit of money. In a business like game book publishing where the margins are already tight, this is maddening.
It's obviously somewhat demoralizing to see the problem splashed across TMP. I would have preferred somebody contact me first, if they had a problem.... but I suppose this is just a fact of life now.
One of the fundamentals of the problem has to do with the economics of the hobby. In order to deliver a good-looking book, but at the small print-run sizes necessary for wargaming, it's very difficult print in the USA anymore. Gamers just won't pay those prices. So I - and most glossy wargame publishers now - print overseas.
I honestly have no idea whether printing overseas makes it more or less likely for a binder to fail. Hell, maybe that's just my nationalisitic snobbery, to think that a local printer would do a better job. All I know is that with the high-production / low-volume combination required by wargame publishing, going overseas is becoming the only feasible business model anymore.
One thing a domestic printer is more likely to be able or willing to do, is to send you a pre-production finished copy for inspection... But if there's only a 2% failure rate, then the odds are that the inspection copy won't turn it up, either, so that probably wouldn't help, unless the problem is catastrophic. And in any event, that costs time and money, which is why for most printers anywhere, page proofing is done electronically now. (And I used an American printer, in softback, for Might & Reason, and still had binder problems with that book, too, even though he sent me a pre-production copy to proof.)
One doesn't pick a printer casually, when tens of thousands of dollars are involved. I spent months getting samples sent to me, talking to people who had had their books printed by this or that printer. I ultimately selected one, from among more than half a dozen competitive bids.
I will say this, though: the difficulties and expenses of delivering hard-back books have really made me think long and hard about whether I want to continue doing it for my next game(s). On one hand, going softback isn't really that much cheaper anymore. On the other hand, the hardback costs more to ship, takes up more storage space, is more likely to get scratched and dented, and I've had an astonishingly high number of people who have claimed that their books simply never showed up in the post (and I really hope they're telling the truth.) So the cost of doing business this way is nearly prohibitive, and I'm starting to look at alternate models.
Sam