It was something I had never considered. Not for a moment. Books were sacred to me. Cut one? Blasphemy.
But he was right. And so I cut it. And it fixed all of my complaints.
What I learned is that some folks have a different mindset; they see the world as something to be shaped around themselves, rather than seeing themselves as something that should be shaped to fit the world. That’s been a useful lesson sometimes.
It indeed is. Thanks for putting it in words. I think I will try to adopt this mindset about certain things in life.
Like Boris Johnson did when he had fun times with a model on the campaign bus, then did a bizarre interview when he claimed he made model buses!
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/26/mesmerising...
Fortunately, she was kidding.
It feels familiar but also kind of jarring.
https://www.reddit.com/r/lifehacks/comments/7sry7v/open_a_ha...
(which was a lesson in 2nd grade, when we got our first-ever hardcover textbooks)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHe2hx1JL7U
For some reason, the lessons learned stuck with me.
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.
Ebooks sync across devices, allow for a customized presentation, quick dictionary lookups, bookmarks, etc. The only slight edge I'll give to a physical book is the ability to easily make marginal notes in pencil -- I realize that ebooks have this feature too, it's just not as immediate or as frictionless.
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..
I have had Kindles since v1. And the pattern was always the same: Read some books and then get to a boring patch in one and stop and then dont read anything for 6-24mo.
When we had my son we decided we wanted to create an environment where he was more likely to make reading a habit (over touchscreen brainrot etc).
We figured the best way to do that would be to:
1. Make sure he saw us reading for pleasure, often. 2. We read to him regularly as a habit. 3. Create spaces ideal for reading. 4. Put books everywhere.
Even before you get to point 4, it’s clear that physical books are just simply the best possible solution.
So I just bought a ton of books, hooked Openclaw up to my Goodreads and had it regularly scan the inventory of local used bookstores, bought some bookcases, and set aside time every morning and evening to read.
And you know what, I’ve never read as much or enjoyed it as much as now. And I attribute it entirely to having a beautiful wall of books next to a nice comfortable chair right in the middle of the living room.
I see my book on my bedside table every day. It’s a book, not another device. Another nice benefit is when people come over we invariably end up standing in front of the book shelf talking about books. And then they often leave with one to borrow.
Physical books have their issues and drawbacks etc but they definitely have changed our family’s life for the better.
Parts V and VI were removed from the wife's version.
That's equally true of print books. Misprints happen.
Can't you dontate them to a library. Or take it from one in the first place..
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.
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 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
Not after what the submitter did.
Nice hardware concept, completely unacceptable software.
I don't have the urge to fight all my devices.
I’ve have had enough bookmarks fall out of the book that I have changed my strategy. Instead of using a bookmark I take a photo of the last page I was reading before closing the book. I then add the photo to favourites so it’s easier to find. And then later when I continue to read, I check in my camera roll to see what page I was on. With the current book I am reading I also like to end on the end of a chapter when I can. Easy to remember that next time I will start reading chapter 5 or whatever. And if I don’t have time or energy to read to the end of a chapter I still try to remember what page number I am on, just in case my phone runs out of battery and I want to continue reading.
[0] https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=%E6%9B%B8%E7%B1%8D%E5%...
[1] https://imgcp.aacdn.jp/img-a/800/auto/aa/gm/article/4/1/4/9/...
Compare that entire rube goldberg machine with one button press on an e-reader.
1. Obsession with massive books.
2. High-value target (this community.)
3. Obviously bad idea that some people will treat as an earnest suggestion.
4. Oblique commentary on bad behavior by AI companies (destructive scanning of rare books.)
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.
And, for several others, I have physically cut out and disposed of offending chapters or introductions using the same physical technique as the article suggests. Deeply emotionally satisfying, and not an option available for DRM e-books, as far as I know. And again, a book lover.
<aside/>I lost interest in programming for pleasure (thank you LLMs), so decided to spend a few years learning all the prerequisites to understand the General Theory of Relativity.
It is so nice to get back to learning from printed matter. The contrast is great. The ability to flip pages back and forth to scan past material is much better than an ebook experience (like referring to a figure on a different page). Best of all, I don't get distracted or tempted to open up a browser window and start doomscrolling. The heft is oddly reassuring too.
1. Two page layout. This gives you more context when reading.
2. Imperfect printing. Older books have imperfect impressions of letters.
3. Tan colored background, which varies across the page and from page to page. Grey is so sterile.
4. Cannot stick a thumb on a page and flip forward and backward with your other thumb.
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.
If you can't figure out how to read a large book in comfort that seems like a you problem. It's up to you what you do with (or rather, to) your books but don't ask me to applaud you for being clever.
Isn’t that exactly what he did?
Applause!!!!
I have faced the problem of books being too big. What I do is I just get an additional copy on my Kindle. For classics this is free, for newer ones, the price is one-sixth to one-third. This is justified because the need is rare.
I read the physical book during the daytime at my home. I travel with the Kindle and take it to my bed.
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.
I do enjoy a very limited number of hardcovers from my most favorite stories from my favorite authors. Great for curling up in bed with.
Paperback is fine, even in the trade paperback sizes now. Though some authors like Brandon Sanderson don't make novels but bookzillas, and I've thought more than once of getting used copies to split for easier carrying.
> 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.
My personal working theory:
Native speakers learn to speak first, then they learn to read and write.
From talking with high-level ESOL speakers, those that learned from written material have some very strange patterns of mistakes you can hear in their English - where they've programmed their pronunciation incorrectly very early on with basic mistakes.
Although English is an outlier here. Because English native speakers learn lots of different ways to manage how speaking and spelling are different. Plus because making speaking mistakes after learning words in books is such a social status mistake.
Personally I think if you want to learn a language, the ideal is with someone who corrects all mistakes, as though one is a baby. Although it is difficult to find this even when one can spend months in a foreign country. Not everyone feels comfortable correcting an adult.
The people that have learned English that I have spoken with that are the best all have a common trait: they've lived in a country and they MIMIC. The most amazing was a hippy Japanese guy: I remember one sentence where he shifted in the middle from broad East London to a strong Aussie accent due to where he learned the words.
I learnt conversational Spanish when I was 30. Next attempt will be 2-3 months immersed Korean as a middle aged guy so I'm looking forward to trying out my opinions!
My natural bent is strongly focused on reading and words. Learning by talking and mimicking is not my strength at all.
I suspect that is why I've noticed the pattern that natural mimickers are the ideal language learners (who I would like to emulate).
Although my beliefs are incoherent... I want software that starts with substituted latin letters into a Korean layout that slowly morphs into Korean (maybe choosing words carefully that have been taken from English).
A la Meihem In Ce Klasrum by Dolton Edwards: https://www.ecphorizer.com/EPS/site_page.php?issue=7&page=29
I wonder what mine is. I feel like I don't take to reading in a foreign language too easily (though I have trouble focusing on reading generally), but I definitely struggle mimicking as well. Some times I really wonder how I learned French at all, I got to my current level of ability quite quickly, though I'm sorely lacking a lot of fundamentals both in writing and in speech.
I agree though, you can see a big difference in language learners on Youtube between those who practice speech vs those who mostly read. For example, Alexander Argüelles [1] is a famous polyglot who's written quite a few foreign-language grammar books, but the few videos of him speaking show his heavy accent.
For Korean, I wouldn't bother with Latin letters. Hangul is simple:
> A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; even a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days.
– King Sejong on (what would become known as) Hangul
Reading in Korean would have been quite difficult historically, when it was mixed with Chinese characters à la Japanese [2], eg.
> 悠久한 歷史와 傳統에 빛나는 우리 大韓國民은 3⸱1 運動으로 建立된 大韓民國臨時政府의 法統과 不義에 抗拒한 4⸱19 民主理念을 繼承하고, 祖國의 民主改革과 平和的統一의 使命에 立脚하여 正義⸱人道와 同胞愛로써 民族의 團結을 鞏固히 하고, 모든 社會的弊習과 不義를 打破하며, 自律과 調和를 바탕으로 自由民主的基本秩序를 더욱 確固히 하여 政治⸱經濟⸱社會
You probably have some natural ability - or even just drive given your interest. Interests and abilities often hold hands.
The the other major issue with languages is that our teaching methods are rather hit and miss.
This is interesting: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2008/sep/02/languages.... -- although I cynically worry that he was perhaps rather better at selling himself than doing teaching.
> For Korean, I wouldn't bother with Latin letters. Hangul is simple
I've poorly and unclearly explained the idea sorry. Writing is hard.
As a kid I loved "pocket books"[1] because they didn't make my hand feel weak trying to hold them on a road trip and I could fit a few in my backpack.
But, obviously, not every work was published in a pocket book format.
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.
For another comparison, the Bible is around three quarters of a million words, and tends to use special paper (20–40gsm/30–50 micron) so it works in one volume.
Handwriting is also a good idea for encouraging keeping lengths down; typing and dictation make verbosity too easy; and as for LLMs, words are clearly far too cheap there.
You mean, like on Reddit? ;)
I read most fiction these days on my Kobo. I prefer physical volumes when I'm sitting at a desk.
Eh? What sort of a pretend-reader does that? You must read nothing more than a page at a time.
I have the Diary of Pepys beside the bed and it’s the excerpts, at only about 1000 pages. Enjoying it tremendously.
In fact - many old huge books are epic. I remember in the early 1990s we had a huge book about history. It detailed each year with the most important events. I loved reading in it. Even today I like it.
Unfortunately I am also now part of the digital-only guys, so I have not bought a hardcopy paper books in quite a while (excluding one exception for Raymond Feist, but by and large I only read .pdf files nowadays). So I store things in .pdf files mostly. I also hate .epub files and refuse to use them.
I still have many old books here, but new books rarely come up and I only keep books I find interesting or important or I may re-read. For instance I have one small hardcopy of 1984; I think it is an important book. And a few more like that. But I barely have any new paper books.
I don't presently have any really huge book. Not sure what I will do should I inherit huge books. On the one hand, having them is kind of cool, but I don't want to keep them in a library or shelf either, so ... I will probably not use it. But I would not chop up any book, not even on a first april. It just seems totally pointless and also defeats the point of having huge books. Huge books are kind of cool. Not practical but cool.
You may love it, but your friend may hate it.
Keep it for yourself.