Hartshorne remains the standard for diving into the field of algebraic geometry. But the copies I, and several others I know who bought the book from Amazon, got very poor quality copies. Compared to the copy my library has, the printing is blurry, the paper feels cheap, and the book can't hold itself open. If you're going to be seriously studying this book, you'll probably spend several months carrying it around. In this case, the binding is likely to fall apart. One person in my department even got a copy printed with margins so wide that the text filled less than half the page. (On a related note, someone else ordered another Springer text and ended up with a book with the correct cover, but an entirely different, unrelated text, inside. Fortunately, that was hilarious.)
I'm not sure where you can get a better quality copy nowadays. If you find one, it's worth an extra expense over one that will just disintegrate.
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