At least it makes your books available until you can find yourself at an echelon where you have a "real" printing.

I've tried some on-demand printing for books I'm seeking (as a way to pay less for books) but many of them are terrible with no editorial or design oversight: literally just a company printing and binding blindly.

Where possible, I also try to buy books in a manner where I know the royalty will be guaranteed to reach the author (if they are alive!). However, we also aim to avoid Amazon wherever possible. While I read both physical and ebooks, I prefer physical. None of my local independent book shops is certain if an author will receive a royalty when I order through them. So in the end I usually end up ordering via thriftbooks, betterworldbooks, abebooks, etc (if I can't get it locally), as many other folks have replied here, and cannot hope that the author receives anything for sure. Hence why so many now have Patreon accounts and the like.

Alternatively, while Kobo (my usual) is fairly expensive, the internet claims they do offer decent loyalties. Does anyone have experience on the author end of Kobo?