I would expect publishers to start promoting ebooks more as it moves consumer attention away from physical books, and the publishers should be able to format the pages, margins, lettering however they want. That is, if they have the foresight to do so and their workflows can handle it.
You'll not prise my paper books from my cold, dead hands with a crowbar. I dislike ebooks intensely and won't use/buy them except for the most ephemeral use-cases (tech books).
I am the same. When it comes to a tech reference book, I want something that I can search, and copy+paste text from. But if I am reading for entertainment, an e-book is the worst experience I can imagine.
I agree. That experience of quickly flipping to a page or jumping from one place to another in the book is sorely missing from e-books. That said, they have their positives too. Like being able to search for definition of a world, quickly looking up notes(not easy to quickly jot though, new kindle may change that) and the ability to carry many many books so that you can change books like channels where ever you are reading.
PS: e-book readers have greatly improved in responsiveness and refresh rate that it is different enough experience if have only seen the early ones
The refresh rate is bad. It's worse. Books are better because they have such a low refresh rate. Like I wouldn't read a book with weird ink, or one written in pencil. Forget it!
I have really sensitive eyes (astigmatism, easily strained, dry, photosensitive) and I can't look at a screen without my glasses for more than a minute without getting a headache (but have otherwise perfect vision). The e-ink screens i own, a last gen Kindle and an Onyx Boox, are really paper-like and do not tire my eyes at all.
It's not a screen that emits light, it's a surface that reflects it. (Technically there are usually small LEDs on the side but they don't hurt your vision, you hardly notice them unless your room light is off).
When my eyes reach their limit with computer and phone screens, I reach for my Kindle Paperwhite. That one screen, with its matte surface and side-lighting, lets my eyes relax.
I'd be all in favor of ebooks as a first-class citizen, except we've been down this road before and we all know where it leads: Books with advertisements embedded in them, which would ruin reading for me.
> Reviews of Ms Rowling’s new book were largely positive
What? This article was clearly written by someone with an angle or who doesn’t follow the publishing industry. The reviews were “largely positive” simply because the book was so terrible the vast majority of reviewers opted not to review it at all. JKR obviously wields a lot of influence in the publishing world and silence from book reviewers about her latest novel speaks volumes.
Compare the four reviews of JKR’s The Ink Black Heart[1] with the 12 reviews given to Richard Osmond’s latest The Bullet that Missed[2] or Stephen Kings newest title Fairy Tale[3] which received 13 reviews or even debut novels from unknown authors like Kaikeyi[4] Beautiful Country[5] both of which received nearly twice as many reviews as Rowling.
There are weird differences between publishers in different countries.
In Poland there is this weird contest of making books largest possible. Mandatory points are huge font, enormous margins, huge spaces between paragraphs and chapters always starting from new page. Preferably with some graphic on half of such starting page. Magnified if it's a children's book. Also polish stylistics use new line for each character speaking so short conversations can take many lines.
It is shocking when you take same book released in UK or US. It looks like at least cut in HALF and actually much easier to read.
Similar in France, books are enormous - huge fonts, very wide margins everywhere, thick paper. The French editions of A Song of Ice and Fire are spread in more (IIRC all books after the first one are split in two) and bigger books than the English ones. It's a horrible waste.
Meanwhile there are "pocket" editions that are on the small side, but better.
The only positive excuse i can find is that publishers consider that the majority of their readers would be older and with poor vision, so bigger books.
Similar to what happens in Germany. But there are somewhat technical details to consider, which drive this tendency:
Both German and French have longer words statistically, so a translation of e.g. a 500 page English book might result in 650-700 pages after translation. Now publishers have to ponder the question wether that's still a "handy" book or if they should split it into two.
And now happens, what we see: books with 300-350 pages look a bit small, so they increase the font size, expand the whitespace and, voila: two "decent" sized books where they "accidentally" increased their revenue too, because they can sell two books.
>Similar in France, books are enormous - huge fonts.
One thing I appreciate in portuguese books is the font size. All the books I order from the UK have a smaller font than what I'd want to read after work.
Harry Potter was the first one to do this. It was really funny, make little kids feel big and proud of reading a huge book so fast, like takes up so much bookshelf, big impressive book. Dude 1.5 point margins, not double spaced because then people notice, big fucking big fucking characters (which isn't terrible, it was in fact easier to read, squinting is harmful), and then like tons of chapters like not 12 like Cien años de soledad no lots of chapters, I got lobotomized so my memories are kinda fucked but to the best of that lobotomized memory the first Harry Potter had like 45 chapters. Chapters are great because every chapter means you get a break...a pagebreak.
That is actually new to me, but maybe because I'm into sci-fi from around 1950-1970, where direct conversations between characters are just "quoted sentences" inside narrator sentences.
I'm a bit of Philip K. Dick fan and have "A Scanner Darkly" in two languages.
Polish version is 150 pages more, an inch wider and an inch taller in size. Not that PKD elaborate language would justify more flourish translation, he was very "straight to the point". It's such a waste.
I would actually appreciate larger font and graphics in English books, it would be easier on the eyes. in return they could drop all the filler and repetition in nonfiction books. Fiction books often could also use some editing.
Not sure why that's downvoted; I'm a slow reader and frequently annoyed at how excessively verbose too many books these days are. SciFi books from a couple of decades ago were much shorter and often better than SciFi books today. I like books that get to the point and tell me straight up what they're about and what the central idea of it is.
Not only that, his books got erased in a lobotomy, so it really was a complete wasted of time to read Snow Crash. That or it was too good, I knew too much.
Does anyone read books anymore? I recently went to the university Library I went to 15yrs back and I was shocked to see how few students were reading books. Most were on their laptops presumably reading from e books.
Most people you see sitting at the library are doing class work or studying with online materials. If you want to see people using books, go up into the stacks or sit by the checkout desk.
No. Not a single person has read a paper book in the last 15 years. If you go into a book store right now and see someone buying a book with cash, then you can be sure they are a mule for a money laundering operation.
The people in public spaces that are "reading books", the pages are actually all blank. They are paid actors employed by Big Publishing to keep the facade up that they are legitimate businesses, and are not just fronts for laundering money for drug cartels and the like.
They are all in on it, and you better keep quiet, or they will be on to you.
Printed books - > 300-400 € per semester. Ebooks from questionable sites - > free. + more and more material is from papers instead of books so pdf were easier unless you wanted to pay 20 cent per page printed at the university printers.
> Printed books - > 300-400 € per semester. Ebooks from questionable sites - > free. + more and more material is from papers instead of books so pdf were easier unless you wanted to pay 20 cent per page printed at the university printers.
As a student (or even researcher), you often gets these papers from similarly "questionable" websites because the typical university subscription for academic journals is not as encompassing as you need it for your studies/work.
Text books are highly dense, and often complete works on a subject (or with reference to others forming a corpus of complete works). Some are kept up-to-date on a subject with annexes.
Few wrote read textbooks, they are often used as reference or worked from. But textbooks can form a through line or a framework to guide you through a subject in a bespoke way - as pictured by an expert or team of experts.
A university library would be the last place I'd expect to see people reading books.
Try a non-university library, an airport, a beach, a coffee shop, poolside, or any number of other places, but university libraries are for studying and doing homework, not usually reading books.
Sure I read physical books, but for me they are one medium among many and don’t hold the mysticism that teachers imbued them with.
They are very very big blocks of plaintext in sequential order. There’s only so many things books are good at. I’ve seen people buy paper books for classes with open book exams where ebooks are allowed and that’s just a mistake.
I feel as ebook technology improves just a tad from where it is today so we get some great large format color I’m probably going to stop buying books to save my wallet and I feel long term the physical book will become a novelty and picked up by hipsters in the same fashion as vinyl.
I can't seem to read from paper anymore. I read plenty online and from PDFs, but I really struggle to read a normal paper book.
This also makes it harder for my kids to read. Too many screens, games and youtube, and they just don't want to read from paper. My oldest at least reads some manga online.
Are you sure you don't need reading glasses? I find reading from screens (such as an iPad) physically much easier than reading from paper. Getting dedicated reading glasses made a huge difference to this and I found reading from paper became enjoyable again.
I do have a second pair of glasses that's slightly weaker than my regular glasses, and I use them for reading. I still struggle to read actual paper books.
> The pleasure of a book that feels right in the hand—not too light or too heavy; pages creamy; fonts beetle-black—is something that publishers strive to preserve.
I am having some cognitive dissonance here.
I have hundreds of books in my pocket. Thousands if you count my O'Reilly subscription.
Nothing about them has changed because of inflation. Except maybe the price.
Yes, all my books "feel" about the same now. And if I don't like the way they feel - maybe because of the font size - I can adjust that for any book.
Here is what I am confused about. Nobody calls an old vinyl LP or a CD "music". No one calls a DVD a "movie".
Why is the idea of a "book" tied so closely to the physical medium it is printed on?
Yes, of course I realize that many people prefer those creamy pages and beetle-black fonts. And for some things I do enjoy the printed page.
But for the most part, I am happy that I have all my books handy on whatever device I'm using. I don't think any more of a book as being the printed word.
> A book is a medium for recording information in the form of writing or images, typically composed of many pages (made of papyrus, parchment, vellum, or paper) bound together and protected by a cover.[1] The technical term for this physical arrangement is codex (plural, codices). In the history of hand-held physical supports for extended written compositions or records, the codex replaces its predecessor, the scroll. A single sheet in a codex is a leaf and each side of a leaf is a page.
...so the book is the medium, not the abstract work of literature. A novel can be available as a book or an eBook (or, if you feel really "retro", as a scroll) the same way as a music album can be available as a vinyl record, a CD or via streaming.
Eh, "book" is widely used as the unit of literature. If someone says "I wrote a book!", you don't assume that they created exactly one physical item by writing on a lot of pages and tying them together or anything.
So? That's the same as saying "I made a record". They probably didn't just make one. But it doesn't change the underlying definitions or the misuse of comparing them incorrectly.
Not really. More like, "a container". It goes in the direction of "physical" (as opposed to the content), but it is not necessarily physical. For example, a file already is a "book".
> Why is the idea of a "book" tied so closely to the physical medium it is printed on?
Maybe because until some 15 years ago, physical books/magazines/newspapers have been _the_ medium that people had been using to consume the vast majority of written texts over centuries, from their very childhood to old age.
> Why is the idea of a "book" tied so closely to the physical medium it is printed on?
Well, terminologically (which is not the exact focus), because 'book' is the «medium»: 'book' comes from "bark" ("beech") and as such intends the container; the content could be called 'text' ("the weaving of ideas").
So, on the actual point:
-- the distinction involving "vinyl" and "opticals", "music" and "movies" on the one hand, and books on the other, is simply that relatively little option for the "storage of words" has fused the ideas of "books" and "texts" more closely.
-- and going towards the point of the quote, there is an actual experience of the object, an appreciation, which is important to some. You have a parallel in "music and movies", but more than in the container, it is in the "reproduction equipment" - theater vs mobile vs television vs projector etc.
I don't understand the confusion here whatsoever. People still associate records with a certain warnth and unintended sounds like scratching. Further, no one who reads significsntly considers books to be just physical books. It's a srrawman. The distinction is that the lower bar for books that exist /only/ as ebooks (due to cheaper publishing costs) results in a noticeable drop in quality that leads to a prejudice against ebook‐only texts amongst consumers.
Ultimately, I use a Kindle and an iPad because it's more convenient, but with a book I can, afterwards (sometimes many months or years afterwards), remember parts of the book by the section they were in and frequently take only a couple of skips to get to the sentence I want.
That's a pretty neat feeling when you don't remember the words but the idea and the rough location so there's some distinct utility. But perhaps AI fuzzy search will suffice in the years to come.
I think you have it backward? Although to a certain extent, books have lasted so long as a technology that the two meanings have become intertwined.
Movies used to come on VHS tapes, now they come on DVDs or via streaming.
Music used to come on 8-tracks, then cassette tapes, then CDs, now streaming.
Novels once came as scrolls, perhaps, but still mostly come as books, although now often ebooks.
Non-fiction writing also mostly comes as books, and I suspect non-fiction ebooks are a smaller percentage of overall non-fiction sales than that of novels.
For what paper scarcity is concerned, the products of foremost (in quantity and name) publishers have already been pulp fiction level for a long time, compared to the offer in other countries.
For what text amount - which one cannot really write as "content amount" - is concerned, that is limited to some specific slices of the "market", e.g. what in some territories is called "literature for evasion". For that matter a piece of information run according to which the highest slice of market in the USA is of colouring books - but that just stretches the gap between "what a book can be" and the standard of "the codified way to convey information and wisdom". It is odd to speak about books and refer to "commissioned hypnotic material".
You haven't asked for feedback, but here you go anyway: If you're wanting to write proper English, you should first write English correctly.
For example, sentences begin with capital letters. Your parenthetical word should have been "reasonable," not "reasonably."
If your English were correct, one might think that readers just aren't putting in the needed effort. Since your English contains multiple errors, I believe that's asking too much of readers.
But pwinnski, I do not need to explicitly ask for feedback: I write here /expecting/ feedback (and to possibly give further feedback of mine). Otherwise, I would not publish.
Now: «sentences begin with capital letters»: yes, not always. In the specific case, a colon was placed and a LineFeed-CarriageReturn for highlighting - the sentence was judged as clearer in two lines. Please note that conventions are local and hardly objective: for example, the French add spaces around (some) punctuation, the Germans invert the acute quotes (those which I use for quoting, '«' and '»')...
The parenthetical was set as 'reasonably', an adverb, because it was meant to be joined to the verb at the end, 'chosen', and placed in that position to modify 'all'. It means that you cannot write 'all terms were chosen' because that would be possibly literally false, but they are substantially so - "a particular effort is taken in choosing the terms - reasonably", with an accent on "more effort is spent on some than on others".
As you see, those you noted are intended choices. You are calling them "«errors»", they are more "deviations". To "err" is more random, like the Brownian motion of those who are lost; to "deviate" is more conscious - and done because the statistical norm, that of consuetude, that of the patterns for GPT (etc.), did not fit.
--
If you, like many of us, fiddled with music: yes, like Schoenberg said, first you know the "general rule", then and only then you break it - I largely agree, especially if you mean "you have to be competent to hack".
"Wrong" (as per language in use), you have to prove it. Frequentism does not count: it should be already understood that this purpose is not to adhere to language in use.
"Stubborn", makes a contradiction, if you - correctly - understand that the goal is different.
The goal in fact is more than «effective communication», but "correct expression". And as you should know, "wrong" means "twisted", but I am the one who is attempting to "make it straight".
Language "in use" will be followed as much as it fits with the prevailing goal of correctness. A philologist is not an ethologist.
For the other goals that you could adopt, consider "cleanness of thought".
And of course, I thank you for your best wishes in the pursuit!
I honestly thank you for the kind advice, but if I wrote in a simpler manner I would not be expressing the original idea - and the purpose was to express "that idea (those ideas)". I surely take uttermost clarity in high regard, but limited to specific cases: when you have to give indications, and be as sure as possible that the other parts do not misunderstand it. There will be little "philosophy" in "sniper on the tower right there". But that does not cover communication such as the one relevant here, which can involve large amounts of interpretation.
I may be not using "English in use" (that is honestly really very far from my aim), but the effort is towards a """certain""" English. I am sorry if you may find it unclear. (Also, it can happen that sometimes I "cut corners" on the time required for proper expression.)
> translator [...] You seem articulate in whatever your native language is
No. I absolutely am not expressing myself according to any native language. Even in my native language it happened quite normally that, for example, professors at school said "ok, let me concentrate intensely now" before starting discussions and exams. I can tell you that I was said to have the highest talent for writing - but unfortunately for this public, here we exchange information and ideas instead of "poetry". :) This is not a translation of anything, just the transposition of elaborated thoughts (of thoughts as they are developed).
--
Edit: I also believe that "Now drop and give me twenty" will return us fitter personnel than "Please, be fed from a straw" - about the Newspeak I mentioned. That is not to be over-used and certainly not abused - just used proportionally to the intended message.
If you intend to accuse my style of something, be more substantive - I just rechecked what I wrote and, yes, I had to correct a 'could' into a 'can'. For the rest, I do not see anything wrong.
You state you "«feel»", but in a discussion board you should elaborate.
-- the article seems to convey the idea of the emergence of grounds for further degradation of quality in the material used for printing books, and I observed that in some territories the "build" quality (for publishers with the highest output) is already dire, using other territories as a parameter. So, "worse than that it will be either a challenge (vertically, for the publishers already going for "pulp fiction" quality) or a further spread (horizontally, for the publishers that still tried to avoid "pulp fiction" quality)"
-- the article seems to stress the issue of "verbosity vs scarcity", and focus on that "literature for spare time" in which "the longer the text, the merrier" is more frequent than in intentional artistic literature, where text length varies from a few megabytes, but very exceptionally, to possibly very little (I noted in a different recent post that texts seem to vary from ~100k to ~1000k at the quintiles) - to write huge texts is much more frequent in works with the sole purpose of filling gaps in an "entertainment market". So, I noted that it is an odd presentation that which brings books as a topic but seems to focus on "attempted blockbusters" (which may be prominent in quantity but will not match what a book, i.e. "«the codified way to convey information and wisdom»", represents).
What I originally wrote does not seem that complicated to me - at least, not unnecessarily: it matches what its intended content is. You are not "at McDonalds", "where chewing is an effort you are spared": real world, relative effort is part of the game. When you "read" something, you have to be an active part in understanding, you are called to "fill in the gaps". I mean, you would be right in accusing of making it overly complicated if there existed ways to express what I wrote - but exactly that - in a different way; whereas, what I wrote was exact (though incomplete, to keep within a reasonable amount of text).
And if something is not clear, just ask.
--
Edit: also (speaking in general, really not necessarily about the present exchange): one can note a phenomenon of "people who simply cannot read, unless the message and its form are the simplest" - this, out of experience. This is extremely worrisome, in the social context. One can also note that some seem to be embracing an idea according to which, "if they don't understand, the problem must be in the message" - which is differently but equally worrisome. These are signals that should call for the highest concern.
Well, in a way, but that comes because when one is asked for clarifications one tends to be more "complete" in the writing, leaving "less gaps to be filled by the reader". The verbosity is there because the original shorter expression was not clear to some.
--
Edit2:
> the way you communicate
I would say, it's (also) "the way I think". From reflection to expression it's pretty literal (apart from the hassle of picking the most proper terms).
As nearby a co-member (Hnrobert42) noted, this public does not come from the same village and household, and I have no idea what the expression «up your own» may mean. You will have to use a more legitimately "common" language, if you want to exchange.
> one can note a phenomenon of "people who simply cannot read, unless the message and its form are the simplest"
This is not the problem here.
> - this, out of experience. This is extremely worrisome, in the social context. One can also note that some seem to be embracing an idea according to which, "if they don't understand, the problem must be in the message" - which is differently but equally worrisome. These are signals that should call for the highest concern.
The highest concern for everyone reading this thread has been your pompous writing style (think in SNR terms if the word "pompous" is too loaded/offensive)
But feel free to believe everyone is lying and only you know the truth.
You have no reason to be "«concerned»" for the "«pompous writing style»", while there is every reason to be concerned from people's inability to read, and for people blaming lack of understanding on the speaker, and for the inability to carry on a discussion constructively, and for the gratuitous dismissals. As paramount concerns.
As I was posting (the initial, original post), I was actually a bit concerned about "you are saying that publications from the UK and USA already often feel a bit cheap in their make, and you are noting that the article's author indicates a book crisis but heavily remains in the "entertainment" area: that is probably not the most insightful of posts" (it was meant to be an initial kernel for possible further development), and instead there has been an uproar about the style. Oh well.
> It is difficult being a deep thinker manytimes
I would not regard myself as a particularly «deep thinker» - I could not measure and rank that, the level is that which it is - though I have a mandate to that for academic and other reasons, but I am seeing strange directions, exacerbated by social networks, involving people claiming rights to judge through basic emotional reactions, and dismissals of whatever is not immediately digestible (and more). That "everything" requires an effort was a basic tenet, in a past society.
English is such a marvelously flexible language, and yet you've stretched it beyond common understanding still.
> For what paper scarcity is concerned...
> For what text amount... is concerned...
I don't think this construction works as well as you think it does.
If I can try to translate what you meant, I'd guess:
As far as paper scarcity goes, the foremost US publishers have already been publishing only "pulp fiction" for a long time, especially in contrast to publishers in other countries.
As far as text size goes, that's only an issue in some segments of the market. In some countries it's called "literature for evasion." For that matter, the biggest slice of the market in the USA is coloring books, but that stretches the definition of "books."
I don't even think I agree with most of what you said, but it wasn't until I tried to translate it into readable English that I knew that.
I am not sure I would fully recognize what I intended in your rephrasing. The first point was about how often those publications feel like "pulp paper" - they are very cheap. In some territories, that happened with publishers that faced some financial crisis, while with one of the most known publishers in English language it is the typical experience.
In the second point, I noted that the amount of text (character count) seems to have a critical relation to the burden set by inflation primarily with that literature that seems to be inflating the number of pages as part of its virtual "key performance indicators". Which seemed to me an odd focus in the article, since "many things are a book" (it seems to some data, as I mentioned, that the largest part of books sold in the USA are colouring books), but for Books (especially when we are talking about a context of crisis), I think of James Joyce and Umberto Eco, not of those produced with the purpose of "I really need to think to something different than the daily hassles, for the longest possible time".
By the way: you used 'as far as x goes' in your translations: I have not had much time to think about it and verify it, but for example I would avoid that expression, for the "relation" I rendered though 'for what x is concerned': because I do not see the metaphor of "covering some distance" proper for the purpose (I may be wrong, I would need a bit of time for concentration).
I would avoid it just like I would try to avoid in French the expression 'tout le monde' for "everyone", because "it is not the whole of the world: it is just this room", or in Spanish the term 'Argelia' because, "really, you inverted them sounds".
That is how I write: vetting the expressions like a judge. I do not know if you do the same.
