Fantasy "Introductions"

I've already talked in my post "Tired of Trilogies" about why I would prefer it if writers wrote a complete story into their book, without making me have to search for prequels or sequels in order to understand what is going on. I don't want reading to be that much of a chore, I just want to pick up a book and have it make sense and provide me with one coherent story. Series are nice, but they're getting old for me at least. What has been irking me more these days is the long introductions that authors write in their attempt to connect the book with all its prequels.

Surely there is a better way of acquainting a reader with what happened in the last four books than giving them five pages of infodump at the beginning? Not only that, but these introductions are often incoherent to anyone who hasn't read the previous books anyway, so they don't really serve their purpose. Often they are very unreadable summaries containing many names and places that I don't care about and can't follow. What's the use in that?

I will admit, I understand where it comes from. I attempted to write a "synopsis" of my novel a couple of years ago and it kept ending up like an info-dump. Too many names and characters to follow up unless you had actually read the book. In my case I had to write it so I could send it to a publisher, so I wasn't doing it to add to the book, but it just made me wonder how much those kind of summaries actually tell you about the story being told. Not much, in my opinion.

I hate to keep using Harry Potter as an example, but I think they are good examples of this. Of course, it would make more sense if you read all the books, but if you were to pick up book #3 you wouldn't find a little prologue/intro trying to summarize the past two books for you. Book 3 starts off with an interesting and well written introduction to Harry as he is doing his Hogwarts homework in secret in the dead of night. This first chapter just brings you into the events of the new story, but all along the chapter and the book there are tiny little hints/reminders to help readers orient themselves into the world and catch up with the important aspects of previous events and the book stands on its own as one book, with one story.

I almost feel like they should just take those introductory synopsis/summary things off of the beginning of books. I don't think there's much that would be lost if the rest of the book is well written.

What do you think? Have you read a good example of the "here's what happened in book 1" intros?