Re:Why 18th century books looked like smartphone screens (2014)
by egypturnash on Monday December 14, 2015 @04:29PM
(#10734038)
I generally prefer reading on my phone/tablets for the portability/convenience/has own light aspects, but I feel like there's a few things the physical book has:
- a subtle but constant reminder of your position in the book, that gives you one more thing to mentally index by when looking back into the book ("I think it was about 1/3 of the way in, on the bottom of the right-hand page), and also gives you a very definite sense of How Much Book Is Left in a more subtle way than a BIG SLIDER AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SCREEN ALL THE TIME
- the ability of the book designer to make choices about fonts that subtly accentuate the book's mood
- footnotes, I miss footnotes so fucking bad sometimes. I do all my e-reading on the Kindle app and it doesn't fucking have footnotes, it just has tiny little superscript links that take you to endnotes, which makes what can sometimes be a quick entertaining authorial aside into a laborious hassle of stabbing at the tiny link multiple times until you actually click it. Especially if it's within the area where tapping will turn the page, so you go to the next page, grumble, go back, repeat 5 times, finally click on footnote, realize you've kind of forgotten the immediate context of the footnote while trying to tap it.
- a subtle but constant reminder of your position in the book, that gives you one more thing to mentally index by when looking back into the book ("I think it was about 1/3 of the way in, on the bottom of the right-hand page), and also gives you a very definite sense of How Much Book Is Left in a more subtle way than a BIG SLIDER AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SCREEN ALL THE TIME
- the ability of the book designer to make choices about fonts that subtly accentuate the book's mood
- footnotes, I miss footnotes so fucking bad sometimes. I do all my e-reading on the Kindle app and it doesn't fucking have footnotes, it just has tiny little superscript links that take you to endnotes, which makes what can sometimes be a quick entertaining authorial aside into a laborious hassle of stabbing at the tiny link multiple times until you actually click it. Especially if it's within the area where tapping will turn the page, so you go to the next page, grumble, go back, repeat 5 times, finally click on footnote, realize you've kind of forgotten the immediate context of the footnote while trying to tap it.