Some things that piss me off about Batman TPBs/hardcovers

[timberwolf]

DC is more interested in selling you a story rather than a book collecting a bunch of issues. That's why they edit out parts of issues that doesn't have anything to do to the story itself. this is also why they remove the covers and put them at the end if they ever bother to do it. They also edit out captions at the start or end of the issues that will give the impression that the book is just a bunch of issues strung together rather than a stand alone complete graphic novel as they intended.

[kalorama]

Nothing I said was inaccurate.

That's not accurate.

For the most part, the issues or stories collected aren't listed on the back of the book... making it impossible for someone to know the contents without prior knowledge of the collection.

It's not impossible. It's not even particularly difficult or burdensome. At worst it barely rises to the level of minor inconvenience.

As already noted, even if the issues aren't listed on the back cover, they are listed on the inside front matter of the book. And despite all the hand-wringing over shrink wrap . . . (A) softcover TPBs are almost never shrink wrapped, making it a simple matter to open up the book and find the issue numbers inside, and (B) not all hardcovers are shrink-wrapped. Some are, some aren't. Some of them have the issues listed on the back cover (where they can be seen even through shrink wrap) and some don't. So unless you go out of your way to only buy shrink-wrapped HCs that didn't have the issue numbers on the back cover, I'm guessing that a fair percentage (if not a majority) of them do have the information you want in a place that's readily accessible. It just happens not to be in the place you'd most prefer.

Life's like that sometimes.

[thwhtGuardian]

I think all that needed to be said has been said, some older trades were lacking in providing list of their contents but most newer ones have that information readily available.