Almost band preservers

We study the stability of band preserving operators on Banach lattices. To this end the notion of $\varepsilon$-band preserving mapping is introduced. It is shown that, under quite general assumptions, a $\varepsilon$-band preserving operator is in fact a small perturbation of a band preserving one. However, a counterexample can be produced in some circumstances. Some results on automatic continuity of $\varepsilon$-band preserving maps are also obtained.