Misprinted Comic Book Collections?

[Blackfire]

I'm fairly new to the comic book scene and so I've been gathering my resources and taking out all of the books of interest from the libraries in my area. Each library usually carries a handful or more of good titles, in the "collection" format of an actual book usually in volumes. It has helped me along greatly, because I'm currently very broke and even though I know there are scans and whatnot at my service, I'd rather read it on paper if it's available to me.

But anyway, I've only been at this for maybe three weeks or less? And already I've come upon two huge errors in book printing.

The first one was with the Marvel series Runaways. I had read the first volume in a large hardcover book and all was fine. That was actually perfect, but once I finished and wanted to move on, all they had were these small manga-like volumes continuing onward from volume one. I picked them up and read them over the week only to find to my dismay that "volume" 5 (I think it was) was actually missing like two issues from the end. I concluded as much because when I moved on to the 6th volume, absolutely nothing made sense. I did a quick google and found someone on yahoo answers asking the same question that I had, which led me to believe this was a mass-produced error and not just a case of pages falling out of a (not even old) library book. It didn't look like the pages had fallen out although the book did admittedly look thinner than the others.

I let that slide without questioning though, although I do still find it very odd.

And then today, just days after finding that error, I pick up the second volume of Sandman from DC/Vertigo and I find that the entire printing is off center. The far left of every left page is cut off by about half an inch, maybe a bit more. It certainly makes reading pretty uncomfortable because it's not always easy to guess the words that are cut off.

I understand that I can't really ask for much seeing as how I didn't actually pay for these books, just took them out by loan at the library but it raised this question: are these types of errors common with printings of comic books? It seems so unusual to see these types of errors in print, at least to me. But I've only been reading novel-type books most of my life, not comics.

Then again, I realize maybe these books were donated to the library because of the errors, but still, the frequency with which I've been seeing this is a little disturbing... has anyone had any similar experiences?

[Iangould]

They're not very common.

Part of my job is to report defects from the shops where I work to Diamond.

Two quite large comics shops probably between them have 1-2 defective books pr month.

[Paradox]

Just curious, are these defects in individual issues or the whole print run?