My vision for the book was very different to theirs. Here's a sample (half-size for convenience).
On the left, two pages from one of the books as Apress published it. On the right, the corresponding single page as I was going to publish it. Well, almost: I wasn't keen on the typeface for the headings and I was going to put a one-liner (of which I had prepared several hundred) at the bottom of the left-hand column; it does give a reasonable idea of what it would have looked like, though.
As it happened, Apress weren't good at publicity either and sales of the books are extremely disappointing. I guess it could be they're great at publicity when they try, they just didn't really try.
I often wonder whether I'd have sold more copies of the books if I'd self-published them.