YHK - yet another hacker news clone

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/articles/end-mass-market-pap...

Last year, ReaderLink, the country's largest distributor of books to airports, pharmacies and big-box stores, announced that it would no longer carry mass markets. The books can still be found in some places, but "as a format, I would say it's pretty much over," Ivan Held, the president of publishing imprints Putnam, Dutton and Berkley, said to the Times.

I too mourn them - much more of a convenient size than the now ubiquitous ‘trade paperback’ - but we’re obviously in a small minority.

https://www.davisr.me/projects/books/

Nice hardware concept, completely unacceptable software.

> I recommend buying your own books for language learning. They can be spiced with underlines, question marks, and exclamation points; they can be thumbed and dog-eared, plucked to their essential core, and annotated so that they become a mirror of yourself.

> What shall you write in the margins? Only the forms and phrases you have understood and figured out from the context.

> Ignore what you can’t immediately understand. If a word is important, it will occur several times and explain itself anyway. Base your progress on the known, not the un- known. The more you read, the more phrases you will write in the margins. The relationship that develops between you and the knowledge you obtain will be much deeper than if you had consulted the dictionary automatically. The sense of achievement provides you with an emotional-affective charge: You have sprung open a lock; you have solved a little puzzle.

I can't really bring myself to write in the books themselves though, so I've been using separate paper. It feels wrong, even in a cheap book, like I'm defiling it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kat%C3%B3_Lomb

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Kat%C3%B3+Lomb

It came with annotations, some kids custom rules, their character sheets and the outline of a custom campaign they were writing. Its got so much texture.

* You own it forever

* Nothing to charge

* Don't have yet another screen to stare at

* Its the definitive way to collect books (similar in the sense of vinyl for music)

* Going to used bookstores is awesome

* Seeing your whole collection physically is awesome and can be a conversation starter

* Graphic novels/comics are still better physical

That said, it never occurred to me to just cut up my book, so I could continue to read it comfortably. I think I might have chosen to do so though, since I find the tactile nature of reading a physical book to be more memorable than digital. Where the words sit on the page, and the act of turning the page, the smell, all does something to my neurons. For my junk novels, I don't really care, but for the authors I cherish, the closer to the printed word I can get the better the experience I have, and the more memorable the writing in general.

A physical book, you encounter in physical space. Thus has a lot more chance to get read. The ebook, one has to take a device and press some button, before the book has even a chance of getting seen...

My ebooks typically get downloaded once, and sits forever unread in some device..

A physical book, I take from a lib and gets read automatically, unless it finds its way to the underside of some furniture...

That IMHO nullifies any convience that e-books have..

Buy the paperback for larping and performative reading. Get the epub from Anna's to actually read it.

I say all this not to try to convince you that you're wrong (it's all a matter of taste after all), but to point out that this isn't just nostalgia. People who read physical books actually prefer them, even if their reasons aren't things you find important.

You can have a book printed in the 1970s and it will be half the thickness, and shorter height. It has the exact same content as a modern book. At some point we went from the average number of pages being somewhere around 200-250 to over 400. You don't actually get more words, they just take up more pages. Paper type might also make a difference, I have 60 year old books with ~250 page, they are half the thickness of a modern murder mystery with around 400 pages, and the old book is hardback, the new one is paperback.

I think it's vanity, people would rather be seen reading a brick of a book, regardless of the actual content. Even if the old hardbacks are easier to handle and carry in your backpack.

You mean, like on Reddit? ;)

For a big book, cutting it up might be desired. Even though book lovers everywhere decry such a move, it's their book.

Obviously there is zero resale value for the book, but I have never sold a book I owned so that wouldn't bother me.

It feels familiar but also kind of jarring.

I still prefer ereaders for novels and most non-fiction books, though.

That was exactly the reason why I tried out the 12.9” iPad Pro back in like 2016. I used that for 8 years, and now am on my second.

Applause!!!!

Isn’t that exactly what he did?

My wife assumed it must have been a joke post!

It indeed is. Thanks for putting it in words. I think I will try to adopt this mindset about certain things in life.

Some, like dickens, just write too long (though he had an excuse, being paid by the word, and in many cases being paid as he worked). Pynchon and Stephenson too. But it feels like Wolfe kept his books short, or at least shorter than they probably started out!