Always assume that something you have, someone will want it after you've had your use of it. They do not want a recreation or approximation with all of it's flaws and compromises, something that provides an altered experience or a skewed view. They want the original. If you treat something as disposable that is a disregard for anyone but yourself. Someone may want your old jacket, your old car, your old book. This consideration for those who come after you is the way things survived, how family heirlooms and sacred relics came to be. It's the idea behind the phrase "Plant a sapling you may never sit in the shade of."
That's what machine generation tries to devalue and bury. Infinite recreations, infinite approximations, with no original to compare to. The perfect tool of someone who wishes to create a reality of their own bias rather than one that is a result of all who came before them.
20ish years ago I complained to my college roommate that my math book was too big. He asked if I was gonna sell it back, and I said I couldn’t—they had a new edition out, so mine was worthless. Cut it, he said.
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.
"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.
Or Disney releasing a movie called "Frozen" so that web searches for "Disney Frozen" stopped returning macabre rumors about Walt Disney's possible posthumous cryogenic preservation.
Ah, so that’s why they released one of their most successful blockbusters, it was all an elaborate plot to bury the well known and long debunked story of the frozen Walt Disney.
Of course, that's why they used the generic word "frozen" with a lot of meanings, as opposed to the specific word "cryogenic" that people would actually search for.
When I took the two day Disney "Walk in Walt's Footsteps" executive employee training 25+ years ago, the training that takes you to his secret apartment above the firehouse, and makes you spend an afternoon as a costumed (minor) character, at the end the woman leading us said "Ok! Now it's time for all of you to kiss Walt's frozen head."
I heard this is a common tactic in news forum discussions too. When you don't want people talking about the substance of the post, then you mention something like how the site is hosted on wix which supports the IDF, and derail the conversation.
I came to a similar realization recently. I used to care so much about how pristine my books looked and then I realized that some of my favorite books I have found in used bookstores are ones which are written all over and have a well-worn feel to them. I now annotate all my books with pencil and also write my name in them. I love seeing a history of who's owned a given book when I open the front cover and see a name and phone number.
The few times I've had a chance to have something signed by an author I like, I've deliberately taken along with me an old and well-loved copy of one of their books. I've bought the new one, sure, but it's the old one I'll ask them to sign. I don't even know if I'll like the new one yet! No one has said anything about it, yet, but I kind of hope they notice and appreciate it.
I bought a copy of Warhammer Quest, a board game, from Lifeline for 5 bucks.
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.
This seems like a lot of work for not a huge payoff. I get that the feel and experience of a physical book has a certain nostalgia, but for me, I'd just leave the big monster on the shelf and grab an epub from Anna's Archive. You have already ensured the author and publisher get paid, you might as well read on an e-reader, which is in my opinion superior in nearly every way to a physical book.
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.
>which is in my opinion superior in nearly every way to a physical book.
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 the reverse. I have a tiny e-reader that fits in my pocket next to my phone. I pull that out instead of doomscrolling on the phone, so I read on trains, on the toilet, etc. It's much more convenient than carrying a dead-tree book around. So I'm way more likely to read a book as an epub.
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.
We are talking about our opinions here, so there are no wrong answers. It's an interesting observation, the physical presence of a book is something I hadn't considered. Having said that, I'd wager lots of us avid readers have a daily habit, and we'd likely be working through our backlog during certain hours, even absent a convenient a physical reminder to do so.
The problem with ebooks is that you cannot be 100% certain that you're reading the original text. That can only be preserved in physical copies. That's why the destructive book scanning for AI is such a tragedy. There's already plenty of examples of original texts being surreptitiously revised, and it happens with videos too.
That's not a problem with Ebooks writ large -- a zip file of a bunch of HTML documents aren't likely to randomly change on you. It's a problem of some evil vendor's "ebook ecosystem", where one day your copy of 1984 could vanish from your library. Most of the ebooks I've been reading lately are all public domain classics from Standard Ebooks.
I was shocked to discover that "How To Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie was heavily rewritten by his wife after his death. I had two copies of the book, and sure enough, one was the old version and the other the new. The new one did not withstand scrutiny.
Hacker News' founder Paul Graham also recommends that you read the original version[1]. I'm curious to see examples of what was changed in the revision. I read it myself a long time ago, but I don't know which one it was and wondering if I missed out on the better version.
Well no, you can only be 100% certain you're reading the text found in that book. Books often change over releases. It's not some sacred tome containing an ever-updating reflection of the author's ideals. It's just the draft at the time the book was printed.
Not the same thing. The kindle ebook you "purchased" could have different text each time you open it up. A movie you stream could be different every time.
Reading your comment I wonder if the parent comment is different each time, because "does the ebook text change reading-to-reading" is not the question being discussed.
This post isn't aimed at people that read a physical book for "nostalgia". They read a lot of books and have already decided that they prefer physical books to an ereader.
That makes no sense to me though. I always prefer physical books to any ereader, but I still stopped accumulating (new) books in my flat - they just accumulate space. I'll always love hardcopy books, but not needing them as a physical hardcopy is just better for me.
I just get rid of most books after reading, knowing that I won’t reread the great majority of them or need them as a reference. For the few that I might unexpectedly end up wanting to reread, it’s okay if I’ll have to reprocure them. That case hasn’t occurred so far.
This one. Recently I added "re-f" property to my templates for the Review base in Obsidian ie how probable a review/reread/rewatch factor that title has. And it's quite liberating to juas write zero there and remove/delete the title. Also helps with datahoarding tendecies.
I had the same problem which inevitable made me buy a bigger apartment. It's hand down the best investment I have ever done since tangible book assets give you so many different an non curated insights which you can only get from reading. You should not see books as something that take up space but rather something that free up space
I had to stop reading one of my favorite authors when I was doing infant duty with my oldest. The books kept getting thicker, and I could no longer one hand them comfortably reading either end of the novel due to the book's balance. I found a kindle mostly solved my problems, and I could keep reading again one handed.
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.
Not one of the things you mentioned about ebooks actually interests me. On the other hand, physical books are more comfortable to read, enjoyable to hold in your hands and flip the pages, don't ever run out of charge, and look nice when you put them on a shelf. For me, they are vastly superior to ebooks.
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.
agreed! I'm actually pulled in different directions; I love the nostalgic value of physical books and enjoy possessing them as artefacts, but I vastly prefer the experience of reading an ebook, especially the page turning with one finger.
At that rate, you might as well buy and use an e-reader instead. It really doesn't get any more comfortable in the hands than a light device like a Kobo or whatever one you prefer.
I somewhat liked my Kobo except for how much Rakuten kept getting more aggressive with forcing their environment on me. And then my Kobo decided to wipe and reset itself on its own, losing all of my bookmarks and other data.
You should check out KOReader [1], an OSS alternative interface software for ereaders. I have it installed on my kobo and I couldn't be happier with it.
My grievance is mainly with the overall firmware/software that has such deep control over storage and all. I've tried KOReader and Plato, but it's just replacing the document reader.
That's cool and all, but I generally prefer my text reflowable, and find PDF reading on any not-huge e-reader to be a pain in the ass. It's worth it for things that are rich in figures and formatting (like House of Leaves, many textbooks, comics and manga, etc), but for the typical novel or non-fiction book, I really do want just text and the most minimal formatting and layout instructions possible, so I can configure to my own comfort, not to whatever the publisher has decided they want me to see.
It seemed to me more about taking control of things to read in ways that are most comfortable and convenient. I was already off the topic of specifically chopping up books.
And you don't even have to hold it open and mess with bookmarks which at least to me was always super annoying. And the built in lamp, chapter search and dictionary. And single tap page forward and back. Physical books are beyond obsolete imho.
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.
I found that Japanese book sales cards [0] work very reliably as bookmarks and don’t fall out. One can easily make them oneself out of thin, preferably non-smooth (friction-y) paper, by folding a strip in two and cutting out a lip for easier handling. In use they look like this [1]. They hold better due to being two strips clasping a book page, and due the static friction of the paper. Because they don’t stick out of the book (the lip bends and can fold) like regular (often glossy) thick-paper bookmarks often do, they also don’t “catch” and risk getting pulled out that way.
In middle and high school when I was reading my way through my parents' fantasy and scifi collection, I got to a point where I'd just make a note of the page number when I set the book down and was able to recall it next time I sat down to read. I don't remember if I kept that up through college, but I've been reading pretty much exclusively on a kindle since 2010 or so.
Well that's certainly the most ridiculous way of keeping track I've ever heard of :D Not only do you always have to scroll through the pages to find the right one, you also have to mess with your phone a bit first.
This is great until you want to flick back quickly to reference something earlier in the book where you can't quite remember the wording but you remember the rough context.
I don't care about chapter search, nor a dictionary. I actively dislike tapping to change pages, it is far less pleasant than turning a page. Physical books are not obsolete, you just don't like them. Which is fine, everyone has a preference. But it's kind of grating when people use the term "obsolete" which implies that one solution is objectively superior to the other, rather than both having a different experience which some might prefer.
I have, on two occasions, actually tossed a book in the trash rather than have someone else stumble upon it. Arguably worse than physical mutilation and I consider myself a book lover.
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.
I have very fond memories of reading hitchhikers guide to the galaxy with a friend in highschool. The book was old and had already started falling apart, and so we just broke it up into chapters and would pass it to the next person one chapter at a time.
<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.
This is done by default in Japan. Most long books are sold as different volumes, parts, etc. At first I didn't really like it (especially because you'd have to buy both Vol.1 and 2 for the whole thing), but it makes sense if you're going to be bringing books around with you.
These are valid. I vastly prefer physical books for things like academic and reference material (and TTRPG books) because of 4 in particular. Many kinds of books, it's very important to be able to flip quickly between arbitrary points, using your digits as quick temporary marks.
I still prefer ereaders for novels and most non-fiction books, though.
If the gutter is wide enough, you can have them rebound with spiral binding. This is incredible useful for holding or putting a book flat. I did this to all my textbooks in college.
I don't understand why Cracking The Coding Interview never published a two volume spiral bound book. It's the perfect candidate: it's huge, you're referencing two different sections regularly, and you stay on one page for quite a while. I never ended up doing it to my copy though.
This is probably just a personal quirk, but I despise spiral bindings. I hate the feel of them. They never hold together. They catch on everything and come apart. Pages get torn far more easily. They make the books - if you can even call spiral-bound stacks if paper that - more difficult to organize. They suck.
It’s going to tire out your hands to hold up an 850-page book for the time it takes to read an 850-page book. If you read in bed, it’s going to tire your arms out, trying to hold this giant tome over your head.
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.
Well, I won't do it, as although books are mainly for reading, they also are beautiful products that I am not willing to destroy. They also look great on shelves and work as decor.
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.
I wish more books would come in the same format as the Macmillan Collector's Library series of books. They're tiny hardback books with thin pages.
I just checked my copy of Moby Dick, it's about 770 pages, but the book has a very pocket-able size of just 15.6×10×3.5 cm (6.2×4×1.4").
I used to do this with textbooks so that I didn't have to carry around the whole book all semester. But, I would take it to staples and have the binding chopped off and have it three hole punched, then keep it in a binder.
I wonder why the publishers insist on selling thick books like that. The books I read tend to come in multiple volumes, and it's not like I would finish it all at once so I just need to carry at most one or two volumes.
There's definitively something weird marketing bullshit going on. I have a few books in an old print and a new print. The new print have larger letter and insane margins and line separation. The larger letters are great, if your eyes aren't the best anymore, I just don't get why half the page is margins.
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 remember a story where some big wall climbers were stuck waiting for a storm to pass, and one of them had brought a paperback book to pass the time. Once he'd finished the first half he cut it in half so the other climbers could have something to do during the wait.
I like physical copies as they can't be remotely deleted, altered, or slapped full of ads.
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 split a Spanish-English dictionary in half so I could carry around just the English to Spanish part to look up the right words while living in a Spanish-speaking country. In the other direction, I got pretty good at guesstimating the meaning of unfamiliar words based on context and cognate roots, or at least I could get the vibes of what the person was telling me.
I hate this. Of course it's your property, you do what you want with it. Do your own illustrations, annotate with abandon, get out the red pen for editing practise...
But for me, I love nothing more than reading a book so big that I practically live in it.
I recently wanted to try one of Kató Lomb's [1][2] preferred language-learning methods: getting a book in a foreign language and reading it (and re-reading it), figuring out words and phrases as if it's a big puzzle and writing them in the margins. From her book "How I Learn Languages" (1970):
> 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.
I'm no polyglot, but talking and reading are very different skills.
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!
I learned French mostly through conversation and immersion. This next language is pretty simple phonologically, and I'm not concerned about having a good accent in it, so the reading-puzzle route is something interesting to try.
Yeah, why you want to know the language strongly matters.
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).
> My natural bent is strongly focused on reading and words.
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
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.
One of the more unintentional "reject modernity, embrace tradition" posts on this site. In a world where this catches on someone will come up with the bright idea of serialized novels again. It's like a payment plan for a book! More watercooler moments waiting for the next volume! Authors incorporating fan feedback between volumes! Imagine all the Dickensian possibilities.
Printing is a good constraint against getting too long, both the physical and cost constraints. Though the Harry Potter series in full still managed to reach a million words.
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.
I don't think cutting it up means he doesn't care about the book when he's going to the trouble of rebinding the pieces so he can keep reading on paper.
I would never do this normally, but when I walked the Camino Primitivo the guidebook contained other routes so was more than twice as big as it needed to. Weight matters so I tore out the bit I needed.
I read most fiction these days on my Kobo. I prefer physical volumes when I'm sitting at a desk.
Nice comment section. Is it necessary to bring up ebooks whenever print books are mentioned? I haven't heard a worthwhile opinion on the matter in at least 15 years. Anyways, cool post.
I do like when books are wrapped, but to the idea of separating them into parts, I would say probably not worth it. Most books I find myself reading lately are pretty dense, and so my focus is on fitting material in my mind and imagination, i.e. into Gardens of the Moon right now, and I am switching between audiobook, small paperback and companion Claude code wrote for me to help me keep track and visualize what's happening. But hey, if it helps you focus on reading, and you own the book, why not? I do think it is better to just go to your library and work through what they have to offer, without buying the books, so that, hopefully leaves slicing off the table.
The word concentric reminded me of sort of an inverse idea in vinyl. Equally cool IMO: concentric grooves. Rush did it. Kate Bush did it. Probably more recent examples. It works like this: drop the needle at a different starting point and the whole record plays through a different groove. Cool, eh?
This does really seem like satire, but in case anyone wants to do this, most (all?) spine glue like PVA can typically be melted by a standard hairdryer. I find that method to be slightly more gentle.
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.
Always assume that something you have, someone will want it after you've had your use of it. They do not want a recreation or approximation with all of it's flaws and compromises, something that provides an altered experience or a skewed view. They want the original. If you treat something as disposable that is a disregard for anyone but yourself. Someone may want your old jacket, your old car, your old book. This consideration for those who come after you is the way things survived, how family heirlooms and sacred relics came to be. It's the idea behind the phrase "Plant a sapling you may never sit in the shade of."
That's what machine generation tries to devalue and bury. Infinite recreations, infinite approximations, with no original to compare to. The perfect tool of someone who wishes to create a reality of their own bias rather than one that is a result of all who came before them.
20ish years ago I complained to my college roommate that my math book was too big. He asked if I was gonna sell it back, and I said I couldn’t—they had a new edition out, so mine was worthless. Cut it, he said.
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.
"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.
cue https://youtu.be/kYfNvmF0Bqw?t=12 :)
Are AI companies trying to poison the search index?
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...
Or Disney releasing a movie called "Frozen" so that web searches for "Disney Frozen" stopped returning macabre rumors about Walt Disney's possible posthumous cryogenic preservation.
Ah, so that’s why they released one of their most successful blockbusters, it was all an elaborate plot to bury the well known and long debunked story of the frozen Walt Disney.
The claim is that it's why the movie has that name, not why they made the movie.
Of course, that's why they used the generic word "frozen" with a lot of meanings, as opposed to the specific word "cryogenic" that people would actually search for.
There are many many much more crazier ideas floating around. This one, even if made up, is funny and not harmful to anything. I'll allow it.
True, zootopia 2 agartha conspiracies exist.
Well it wouldn't have been as effective as a box office bomb.
When I took the two day Disney "Walk in Walt's Footsteps" executive employee training 25+ years ago, the training that takes you to his secret apartment above the firehouse, and makes you spend an afternoon as a costumed (minor) character, at the end the woman leading us said "Ok! Now it's time for all of you to kiss Walt's frozen head."
Fortunately, she was kidding.
Wait until you learn about the namesake for "Dubai chocolate" [NSFW]
Or Eldin ring naming your horse "Torrent" so that searches for "Eldin Ring Torrent" would bring up your horse instead of pirate downloads
[dead]
I heard this is a common tactic in news forum discussions too. When you don't want people talking about the substance of the post, then you mention something like how the site is hosted on wix which supports the IDF, and derail the conversation.
Damn, did news articles ~7 years ago really just consist of a series of embedded tweets?
It feels familiar but also kind of jarring.
They still do, to the best of my knowledge, although they have started incorporation reddit discussion too.
Yes, and I recall at the time being exasperated by it -- "Twitter is NOT NEWS it is children yelling across the playground at each other!"
I remember telling people about it back then and it sounded crazy even to me. Yet..
I came to a similar realization recently. I used to care so much about how pristine my books looked and then I realized that some of my favorite books I have found in used bookstores are ones which are written all over and have a well-worn feel to them. I now annotate all my books with pencil and also write my name in them. I love seeing a history of who's owned a given book when I open the front cover and see a name and phone number.
I once read that the only way you can actually damage a book, is by not reading it.
Well, one can damage a hardcover by not opening it properly the first time:
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)
Wow. I’m almost 40 and never knew this!
When I was in grade school in the 60s (I'm old) they showed us this film:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHe2hx1JL7U
For some reason, the lessons learned stuck with me.
Fire is pretty effective too, in my experience.
Floods are pretty bad for them too. I have some books drying now, some paper is really bad about getting wet while others are okay.
they're not exactly thrilled by termites either. lost a lot of my grandparents' books to that.
The few times I've had a chance to have something signed by an author I like, I've deliberately taken along with me an old and well-loved copy of one of their books. I've bought the new one, sure, but it's the old one I'll ask them to sign. I don't even know if I'll like the new one yet! No one has said anything about it, yet, but I kind of hope they notice and appreciate it.
I bought a copy of Warhammer Quest, a board game, from Lifeline for 5 bucks.
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.
This seems like a lot of work for not a huge payoff. I get that the feel and experience of a physical book has a certain nostalgia, but for me, I'd just leave the big monster on the shelf and grab an epub from Anna's Archive. You have already ensured the author and publisher get paid, you might as well read on an e-reader, which is in my opinion superior in nearly every way to a physical book.
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.
>which is in my opinion superior in nearly every way to a physical book.
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 the reverse. I have a tiny e-reader that fits in my pocket next to my phone. I pull that out instead of doomscrolling on the phone, so I read on trains, on the toilet, etc. It's much more convenient than carrying a dead-tree book around. So I'm way more likely to read a book as an epub.
Yes! Yes!!
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.
We are talking about our opinions here, so there are no wrong answers. It's an interesting observation, the physical presence of a book is something I hadn't considered. Having said that, I'd wager lots of us avid readers have a daily habit, and we'd likely be working through our backlog during certain hours, even absent a convenient a physical reminder to do so.
The problem with ebooks is that you cannot be 100% certain that you're reading the original text. That can only be preserved in physical copies. That's why the destructive book scanning for AI is such a tragedy. There's already plenty of examples of original texts being surreptitiously revised, and it happens with videos too.
That's not a problem with Ebooks writ large -- a zip file of a bunch of HTML documents aren't likely to randomly change on you. It's a problem of some evil vendor's "ebook ecosystem", where one day your copy of 1984 could vanish from your library. Most of the ebooks I've been reading lately are all public domain classics from Standard Ebooks.
I was shocked to discover that "How To Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie was heavily rewritten by his wife after his death. I had two copies of the book, and sure enough, one was the old version and the other the new. The new one did not withstand scrutiny.
Hacker News' founder Paul Graham also recommends that you read the original version[1]. I'm curious to see examples of what was changed in the revision. I read it myself a long time ago, but I don't know which one it was and wondering if I missed out on the better version.
[1] https://paulgraham.com/startupfaq.html
May I ask: what was different? This is the first time I’ve heard of this and I’ve only seen what was, likely, the new edition.
My original copy was printed in 1977. His wife's version that I have was printed in 1981.
Parts V and VI were removed from the wife's version.
Well no, you can only be 100% certain you're reading the text found in that book. Books often change over releases. It's not some sacred tome containing an ever-updating reflection of the author's ideals. It's just the draft at the time the book was printed.
> The problem with ebooks is that you cannot be 100% certain that you're reading the original text.
That's equally true of print books. Misprints happen.
Not the same thing. The kindle ebook you "purchased" could have different text each time you open it up. A movie you stream could be different every time.
Reading your comment I wonder if the parent comment is different each time, because "does the ebook text change reading-to-reading" is not the question being discussed.
This post isn't aimed at people that read a physical book for "nostalgia". They read a lot of books and have already decided that they prefer physical books to an ereader.
That makes no sense to me though. I always prefer physical books to any ereader, but I still stopped accumulating (new) books in my flat - they just accumulate space. I'll always love hardcopy books, but not needing them as a physical hardcopy is just better for me.
Why can’t someone else have a different opinion than you, even if it doesn’t make sense to you?
You seem to be optimizing for storage space, while others are optimizing for their preferred reading experience.
>they just accumulate space..
Can't you dontate them to a library. Or take it from one in the first place..
I just get rid of most books after reading, knowing that I won’t reread the great majority of them or need them as a reference. For the few that I might unexpectedly end up wanting to reread, it’s okay if I’ll have to reprocure them. That case hasn’t occurred so far.
This one. Recently I added "re-f" property to my templates for the Review base in Obsidian ie how probable a review/reread/rewatch factor that title has. And it's quite liberating to juas write zero there and remove/delete the title. Also helps with datahoarding tendecies.
I had the same problem which inevitable made me buy a bigger apartment. It's hand down the best investment I have ever done since tangible book assets give you so many different an non curated insights which you can only get from reading. You should not see books as something that take up space but rather something that free up space
I had to stop reading one of my favorite authors when I was doing infant duty with my oldest. The books kept getting thicker, and I could no longer one hand them comfortably reading either end of the novel due to the book's balance. I found a kindle mostly solved my problems, and I could keep reading again one handed.
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.
for a lot of people the huge payoff is the experience of reading a physical book. the ergonomics and sensory aspects are very different.
This is what I do as well.
Buy the paperback for larping and performative reading. Get the epub from Anna's to actually read it.
Not one of the things you mentioned about ebooks actually interests me. On the other hand, physical books are more comfortable to read, enjoyable to hold in your hands and flip the pages, don't ever run out of charge, and look nice when you put them on a shelf. For me, they are vastly superior to ebooks.
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.
agreed! I'm actually pulled in different directions; I love the nostalgic value of physical books and enjoy possessing them as artefacts, but I vastly prefer the experience of reading an ebook, especially the page turning with one finger.
honestly, a manila envelope and some elmer’s glue is a lot easier than i expected going in.
Nah there's a lot of reasons to prefer physical
* 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
> "Seeing your whole collection physically is awesome"
Not after what the submitter did.
At that rate, you might as well buy and use an e-reader instead. It really doesn't get any more comfortable in the hands than a light device like a Kobo or whatever one you prefer.
I somewhat liked my Kobo except for how much Rakuten kept getting more aggressive with forcing their environment on me. And then my Kobo decided to wipe and reset itself on its own, losing all of my bookmarks and other data.
Nice hardware concept, completely unacceptable software.
You should check out KOReader [1], an OSS alternative interface software for ereaders. I have it installed on my kobo and I couldn't be happier with it.
[1] https://koreader.rocks/
My grievance is mainly with the overall firmware/software that has such deep control over storage and all. I've tried KOReader and Plato, but it's just replacing the document reader.
Amongst the big ereader brands, Kobo is actually the nicest in terms of letting users hack them.
But Amazon does give a seamless experience.
I don't have the urge to fight all my devices.
So many books not available as epub...
I chop my books and read them on my reMarkable tablet. It really doesn't get any better.
https://www.davisr.me/projects/books/
That's cool and all, but I generally prefer my text reflowable, and find PDF reading on any not-huge e-reader to be a pain in the ass. It's worth it for things that are rich in figures and formatting (like House of Leaves, many textbooks, comics and manga, etc), but for the typical novel or non-fiction book, I really do want just text and the most minimal formatting and layout instructions possible, so I can configure to my own comfort, not to whatever the publisher has decided they want me to see.
You must have forgotten the point of this thread was about chopping books.
It seemed to me more about taking control of things to read in ways that are most comfortable and convenient. I was already off the topic of specifically chopping up books.
You replied to someone comparing it to e-readers; you do not get to complain they say more about e-readers.
What do you do with the pages of the book once you’ve scanned it?
And you don't even have to hold it open and mess with bookmarks which at least to me was always super annoying. And the built in lamp, chapter search and dictionary. And single tap page forward and back. Physical books are beyond obsolete imho.
> mess with bookmarks
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.
I found that Japanese book sales cards [0] work very reliably as bookmarks and don’t fall out. One can easily make them oneself out of thin, preferably non-smooth (friction-y) paper, by folding a strip in two and cutting out a lip for easier handling. In use they look like this [1]. They hold better due to being two strips clasping a book page, and due the static friction of the paper. Because they don’t stick out of the book (the lip bends and can fold) like regular (often glossy) thick-paper bookmarks often do, they also don’t “catch” and risk getting pulled out that way.
[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/...
In middle and high school when I was reading my way through my parents' fantasy and scifi collection, I got to a point where I'd just make a note of the page number when I set the book down and was able to recall it next time I sat down to read. I don't remember if I kept that up through college, but I've been reading pretty much exclusively on a kindle since 2010 or so.
Well that's certainly the most ridiculous way of keeping track I've ever heard of :D Not only do you always have to scroll through the pages to find the right one, you also have to mess with your phone a bit first.
I would assume that the photo includes the page number.
It does. I photograph the page, not a super close-up of a few words of text.
It's still O(log n) to find the right page from a closed book.
Compare that entire rube goldberg machine with one button press on an e-reader.
This is great until you want to flick back quickly to reference something earlier in the book where you can't quite remember the wording but you remember the rough context.
I don't care about chapter search, nor a dictionary. I actively dislike tapping to change pages, it is far less pleasant than turning a page. Physical books are not obsolete, you just don't like them. Which is fine, everyone has a preference. But it's kind of grating when people use the term "obsolete" which implies that one solution is objectively superior to the other, rather than both having a different experience which some might prefer.
I feel like we’ve been hit by one of Michael O. Church’s troll agents.
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.)
At it's heart, this post is: if you own it, do what you want with it.
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.
I have, on two occasions, actually tossed a book in the trash rather than have someone else stumble upon it. Arguably worse than physical mutilation and I consider myself a book lover.
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.
I have very fond memories of reading hitchhikers guide to the galaxy with a friend in highschool. The book was old and had already started falling apart, and so we just broke it up into chapters and would pass it to the next person one chapter at a time.
I just did this for the first time.
<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.
If you think this book is too big, I'd like to remind you that there are one-volume paperback editions of The Lord Of The Rings (I have this one: https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/r-tolkien-lord-rings-...) with 1100+ pages.
This is done by default in Japan. Most long books are sold as different volumes, parts, etc. At first I didn't really like it (especially because you'd have to buy both Vol.1 and 2 for the whole thing), but it makes sense if you're going to be bringing books around with you.
I've gotten really used to it too. I find myself reading more because I can carry most books in the side pocket of my shorts or whatever.
I use an ereader a lot. They have glaring lacks that nobody seems to have addressed:
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.
These are valid. I vastly prefer physical books for things like academic and reference material (and TTRPG books) because of 4 in particular. Many kinds of books, it's very important to be able to flip quickly between arbitrary points, using your digits as quick temporary marks.
I still prefer ereaders for novels and most non-fiction books, though.
Ereaders are better suited for novels, but not so good for reference books.
On the flipside, if I fall asleep reading my ereader, I almost never lose my page. It just goes to sleep too, with the last open page ready to resume.
And the ereader doesn't leave my fingers smelling like mildew!
> Two page layout. This gives you more context when reading.
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 the gutter is wide enough, you can have them rebound with spiral binding. This is incredible useful for holding or putting a book flat. I did this to all my textbooks in college.
I don't understand why Cracking The Coding Interview never published a two volume spiral bound book. It's the perfect candidate: it's huge, you're referencing two different sections regularly, and you stay on one page for quite a while. I never ended up doing it to my copy though.
This is probably just a personal quirk, but I despise spiral bindings. I hate the feel of them. They never hold together. They catch on everything and come apart. Pages get torn far more easily. They make the books - if you can even call spiral-bound stacks if paper that - more difficult to organize. They suck.
I hate my non-spiral bound music books - they never sit well on a music stand. However for all other books I agree, spiral sucks.
It’s going to tire out your hands to hold up an 850-page book for the time it takes to read an 850-page book. If you read in bed, it’s going to tire your arms out, trying to hold this giant tome over your head.
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.
> If you can't figure out how to read a large book in comfort
Isn’t that exactly what he did?
I will applaud them for being clever, hacky even.
Applause!!!!
Well, I won't do it, as although books are mainly for reading, they also are beautiful products that I am not willing to destroy. They also look great on shelves and work as decor.
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.
Just don't have weak hands.
I wish more books would come in the same format as the Macmillan Collector's Library series of books. They're tiny hardback books with thin pages. I just checked my copy of Moby Dick, it's about 770 pages, but the book has a very pocket-able size of just 15.6×10×3.5 cm (6.2×4×1.4").
I used to do this with textbooks so that I didn't have to carry around the whole book all semester. But, I would take it to staples and have the binding chopped off and have it three hole punched, then keep it in a binder.
I wonder why the publishers insist on selling thick books like that. The books I read tend to come in multiple volumes, and it's not like I would finish it all at once so I just need to carry at most one or two volumes.
There's definitively something weird marketing bullshit going on. I have a few books in an old print and a new print. The new print have larger letter and insane margins and line separation. The larger letters are great, if your eyes aren't the best anymore, I just don't get why half the page is margins.
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.
When I was a broke college student I would buy thicker books to get best value.
I think it's fun. You'll also get the IKEA effect helping you to appreciate the book more
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IKEA_effect
I remember a story where some big wall climbers were stuck waiting for a storm to pass, and one of them had brought a paperback book to pass the time. Once he'd finished the first half he cut it in half so the other climbers could have something to do during the wait.
I like physical copies as they can't be remotely deleted, altered, or slapped full of ads.
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 love my kindle for this exact reason. I never shy away from a book that's "too big" anymore because I have no idea how big it is!
I split a Spanish-English dictionary in half so I could carry around just the English to Spanish part to look up the right words while living in a Spanish-speaking country. In the other direction, I got pretty good at guesstimating the meaning of unfamiliar words based on context and cognate roots, or at least I could get the vibes of what the person was telling me.
I hate this. Of course it's your property, you do what you want with it. Do your own illustrations, annotate with abandon, get out the red pen for editing practise... But for me, I love nothing more than reading a book so big that I practically live in it.
I recently wanted to try one of Kató Lomb's [1][2] preferred language-learning methods: getting a book in a foreign language and reading it (and re-reading it), figuring out words and phrases as if it's a big puzzle and writing them in the margins. From her book "How I Learn Languages" (1970):
> 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
I'm no polyglot, but talking and reading are very different skills.
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!
I learned French mostly through conversation and immersion. This next language is pretty simple phonologically, and I'm not concerned about having a good accent in it, so the reading-puzzle route is something interesting to try.
Yeah, why you want to know the language strongly matters.
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
> My natural bent is strongly focused on reading and words.
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
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Arg%C3%BCelles
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_mixed_script
> learned French at all, I got to my current level of ability quite quickly
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.
Or, and I'm just pointing out the obvious, read the book on an ebook reader and maintain the wallpaper value of the original dead tree book.
This is exactly why I love e-books as an adult.
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.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_Books
These are more generically known as ‘mass market paperbacks’ - and are sadly basically extinct:
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.
Chaotic neutral behavior.
Here I thought this was about shredding your books and going completely digital to save space.
Don't forget to sort by color when you're done!
One of the more unintentional "reject modernity, embrace tradition" posts on this site. In a world where this catches on someone will come up with the bright idea of serialized novels again. It's like a payment plan for a book! More watercooler moments waiting for the next volume! Authors incorporating fan feedback between volumes! Imagine all the Dickensian possibilities.
Plenty of webfiction out there which is exactly this. It does tend to fall into the trap of going on forever though.
Printing is a good constraint against getting too long, both the physical and cost constraints. Though the Harry Potter series in full still managed to reach a million words.
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.
There is a lot of web fiction out there that would be better if the authors had written "the end" a few years ago.
> someone will come up with the bright idea of serialized novels again
You mean, like on Reddit? ;)
Is it easier to do this than to hold your big book and read it?
At this point if you don't care at all for the book itself as an object just buy an xteink-x3 with CrossPoint or PocketBook then install Koreader.
I don't think cutting it up means he doesn't care about the book when he's going to the trouble of rebinding the pieces so he can keep reading on paper.
I would never do this normally, but when I walked the Camino Primitivo the guidebook contained other routes so was more than twice as big as it needed to. Weight matters so I tore out the bit I needed.
I read most fiction these days on my Kobo. I prefer physical volumes when I'm sitting at a desk.
Giving yourself the old playstation experience. Please insert Disc 2.
>If you read in bed, it’s going to tire your arms out, trying to hold this giant tome over your head.
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.
Nice comment section. Is it necessary to bring up ebooks whenever print books are mentioned? I haven't heard a worthwhile opinion on the matter in at least 15 years. Anyways, cool post.
No, it's necessary only when the alternative is to mutilate the print edition...
I do like when books are wrapped, but to the idea of separating them into parts, I would say probably not worth it. Most books I find myself reading lately are pretty dense, and so my focus is on fitting material in my mind and imagination, i.e. into Gardens of the Moon right now, and I am switching between audiobook, small paperback and companion Claude code wrote for me to help me keep track and visualize what's happening. But hey, if it helps you focus on reading, and you own the book, why not? I do think it is better to just go to your library and work through what they have to offer, without buying the books, so that, hopefully leaves slicing off the table.
so this is why people buy books! I mostly read ones from the library
Next up: cutting your vinyl records into concentric circles, so you won't have to carry the weight of the songs you don't like!
The word concentric reminded me of sort of an inverse idea in vinyl. Equally cool IMO: concentric grooves. Rush did it. Kate Bush did it. Probably more recent examples. It works like this: drop the needle at a different starting point and the whole record plays through a different groove. Cool, eh?
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multisided_record
This does really seem like satire, but in case anyone wants to do this, most (all?) spine glue like PVA can typically be melted by a standard hairdryer. I find that method to be slightly more gentle.
That advice makes no sense.
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.
Quick, someone make a startup to print chopped-up-books on demand.
Or - don't choose 850 page books for a book club?
You may love it, but your friend may hate it.
Keep it for yourself.
This seems rather silly, but I admire the audacity, it's a statement in itself.
Having hundreds of books at home and being a great enjoyer of old books, fuck off.
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Did you read it?
(It's a joke) https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...
I am so confused
I just did a little sick