Why 18th century books looked like smartphone screens (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Why 18th century books looked like smartphone screens (2014)

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106 pointse15ctr0n35 comments

This is an interesting essay - I definitely think there's a lot to be learned about graphic design from 18th century print culture, especially people like William Hogarth with his "Line of Beauty." Incidentally, John Overholt, who offers up a comment excerpted at the end of the piece, is one of my favorite people to follow on Twitter. He's the curator of early modern books at Harvard's Houghton Library so it's basically a series of gems that he unearths in the stacks:

https://twitter.com/john_overholt

> The point being, of course, that the ergonomics of smartphones as reading devices are not only kind of rad, but historically so.

You can also turn this around and say that smartphones throw away three centuries worth of ergonomic improvements in reading. I personally find smartphones completely unusable for any kind of longer text.

> I personally find smartphones completely unusable for any kind of longer text.

Literally two paragraphs after that he notes that historical authors didn't often write anything longer than a magazine article. So it makes sense that you wouldn't read a modern book on a smartphone, but blog posts are no problem.

The article's author read War and Peace, Middlemarch, and Moby Dick on his smartphone.

I've read entire novels on a TI-89. That doesn't make it an ideal format.

> I personally find smartphones completely unusable for any kind of longer text.

I definitely prefer reading anything on my Surface (10") or previously the Nook (7"), or on my desktop if I'm there over the small phone screen.

In what way? In my opinion, a high resolution 5" AMOLED smartphone is superior to any other reading device including paper and e-paper, except for works that are diagram/table heavy, and for reading outside where glare becomes an issue.

- AMOLED means perfect blacks, use white on black for nighttime reading

- internally self illuminated for night time reading

- light weight and lack of page turning allows wide variety in reading positions. The use of volume keys for page turning allows easy one hand operation, improving the number of positions available

- narrow width eliminates horizontal eye scan. This is important -- most people do not read a word at a time, their brain processes an entire phrase at a time. If that phrase spans two lines, being able to focus your eyes on the end of one line and the beginning of the next at the same time significantly improves your ability to read the work quickly with full understanding.

It's not just about how a single page looks.

Even assuming that a nice backlit AMOLED is preferable to ink on paper in good light (which I'm not sure is true), physical books have pages that are easily turned, quick random access to different parts of book, and lots of subtle cues to reader about current location, etc. This is an advantage over ebooks.

Ebooks can be digitally searched, which of course is an advantage for them. But it's hardly clear that any electronic reading experience is hands down superior to physical book in all situations. And if one were it would not likely be an ebook in a 5" form factor, that's too small. 5" is good for portability, but for sitting down in a chair at home for a 1 hour session, I can't imagine anyone preferring a 5" smartphone to a larger tablet. (I say all of this as someone who probably reads 40% on 4.5" smartphone, 30% on 13" laptop, 20% on 8" tablet, and 10% physical books.)

I've always liked that pleasant surprise you get when a novel finished "early" because there's a novella or preview of another book or something that comes after the main text, so that those "subtle clues" don't give you unwanted hints that you're near the end.

That's an annoying thing with short stories on Project Gutenberg. Half the pages are backmatter and frontmatter.

I much prefer tapping the edge of a page vs moving my entire hand/arm to turn a page. +1 for digital for ease of turn.

Quick random access to different parts of a book? A digital table of contents that I can bring up anytime and instantly tap to go to the section? Much faster than finding the TOC in the beginning, reading the page number, then hunting around for the actual page. Ugh. +1 Digital.

How about randomly jumping around the book? All reader apps I use have a scrubber at the bottom, I just drag that wherever I like and boom, instant. Just like thumbing through the book. Many advanced readers will even show a live preview of the page as I scrub! +1 Digital.

Add in the ability to scale font sizes (+1 digital), adjustable line heights (+1 digital), adjustable margins (+1 digital), Text-to-speech (+1 digital), non-destructive highlights and annotations (+1 digital), tappable footnotes and references (+1 digital), unlimited bookmarks (+1 digital), adjustable bg/fg color and lighting (+1 digital), self backlit (+1 digital), and the ability to have THOUSANDS of books in a few ounces. It's no contest.

And 5" too small? I think it is the perfect size. Easy for one-handed use.

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.

> physical books have pages that are easily turned, quick random access to different parts of book, and lots of subtle cues to reader about current location, etc.

Even if that were true, the benefits of a digital reader far far outweigh its drawbacks over its physical counterpart:

1. Digital means, no space required. A library full of books can be easily accommodated on your 64GB MicroSD card!

2. Digital means no wear and tear. History is evidence to the loss of thousands of books and corresponding knowledge due to calamities. With digital, you can backup it to your Google-Drive/Dropbox and they will survive the ages.

3. Digital means no tyranny of authorities. Gone are the days when books used to be "banned" by state authorities for whatever reason. With digital, no one can subvert your freedom to read anything you like.

4. Most importantly, digital means easy sharing. If you have a book in PDF/EPUB, you can just email it, in case you want to share it with someone. With physical books, you have to physically snail-mail it which is quite cumbersome.

A lot of concerns you have made (like page-turning) in fact relate to our age-old habits since we are accustomed to physical books, and like many other things in life, all we have to do is just adapt to this new technology!

Oh, yes, that's a good list, and I agree almost entirely. I wrote the post you're responding to, and I'm basically a digital convert. Just this year I got rid of thousands of physical books that I'd accumulated over last 30 years, and which were huge drag on my life, both from space requirements and from weight (made moving residences more difficult).

Having said that, I would generally prefer to read a physical book. If I had a physical book and and a nice tablet with the same (but digital) book in front of me, I would likely be reaching for the physical book. Ink on paper in good lighting is preferable to any screen I've seen. And there's an ease to paging through a physical book that none of the devices I've read ebooks on can match. So, yes, I agree ebooks on are on the whole preferable. But I would never go so far as to say they always provide a better reading experience. So far my ebook reading experiences are not quite as satisfying as physical books, but any deficiencies are outweighed by other advantages of digital medium.

> 3. Digital means no tyranny of authorities. Gone are the days when books used to be "banned" by state authorities for whatever reason. With digital, no one can subvert your freedom to read anything you like.

That depends on how controlled the digital platform is: a few years ago Amazon deleted[1] purchased books from Kindles (George Orwell's 1984 - for maximum irony points).

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18ama...

use grey text on black background. Absolutely 21th century

An e-paper is far superior to TFT/LCD/OLED for reading books outside. Try out a Kindle e-paper reader and come back later.

I do have a Kobo, but it usually isn't worth the trouble to move my books over from my phone. It's only full sun that's really problematic on a phone, and that's hard on the eyes no matter what you use. A phone works fine in the shade. e-paper might work better there, but not enough better to be worth the hassle, since the vast majority of my reading is inside where AMOLED is superior.

With Kindle, you just open the book on your phone (after you spend 2 minutes setting up the app).

I use my iPad most times too (indoor). But outside, I switch to my Kindle as e-paper display can be read everywhere and there are no annoying reflections. Also at least Kindle lets you sync your books, so you can continue reading at the same position on a different device (app) later.

I wish HN would implement some width controls on comments to help with horizontal eye scan...

Quick hack that works for everywhere, not just HN: stop using your browser full-screen. I'm in front of a 24" monitor right now but I keep my browser down to about 10-12" wide.

Nerdier hack: use the Stylish browser extension to inject your own CSS for HN. https://userstyles.org/styles/browse?search_terms=hacker+new...

For me, eye fatigue. E-ink feels like reading paper. TN & IPS make my eyes hurt eventually. (I can't comment on AMOLED, never had a device fancy enough to have it)

Modern cell phone AMOLED displays may be a poor choice for nighttime reading. They typically dim the screen brightness through the use of pulse width modulation (PWM) operating at the frequency of approximately 240 Hz. This is the same kind of low-frequency PWM found on early LED-backlit LCD displays that some users reported to cause them more eye strain than their previous CCFL-backlit monitors. I have not seen any medical study examining their complaints but companies like BenQ responded by publicly announcing "flicker-free" (i.e., PWM-free) monitors while others made the change quietly in their new product lines. We've seen PWM in LED backlights either phased out or configured to operate at higher frequencies (often >1000 Hz).

For an introduction to the whole PWM business, read http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/articles/pulse_width_modulation..... Personally, I do notice PWM flicker at 0% brightness on some screens (you at the very least see it as strobed residual images as you move your eyes across the screen). I am not sure if it has caused me any extra eye strain but I found it annoying enough to consciously go for PWM-free displays when purchasing kit. I wouldn't pick such a screen for nighttime reading specifically.

I have a reasonably priced 7" ASUS Fonepad. It doubles up as my smart-phone too since my hands are large enough to easily hold it. Most importantly, it has a reading mode button (perhaps a feature of Android Kitkat itself) that dims the LCD and puts a yellowish haze, so its super-easy for reading. I personally spend several hours a day reading books on it.

Wrong title. Cart before horse. Should be: "Why Smartphone screens still look like 18th century books."

When it comes to how to combine graphics and text, smartphones offer little new compared to thousands and thousands of years worth of artists and authors seeking to catch the eye of viewers.

The large font size might also relate to the unavailability of cheap mass-produced reading glasses, perhaps it was aimed at an educated older readership.

One difference, in the 18th century, they cared about the format.

Now if only ebook publishers (a) hired proofreaders (b) could figure out how to properly render diagrams, specialized fonts and pictures such that reading an ebook containing such was anything other than a disappointment.

I thought the "sloppy" era would be over by now as the technology and acceptance increased, but for whatever reason, ebooks still are given lesser priority than printed matter when it comes to editing and layout (and still are kind of a ripoff compared to the printed edition because of that).

Could it be due to the perception (loosely based in fact) that the hard copy is forever, and therefore you better do a good job first, whereas the electronic media could be corrected post-release?

No, it's because ebooks flow the text and images dynamically to accommodate different screen and font sizes whereas a book can be statically typeset.

If only there were a technology which was screen and font size agnostic that could display text interspersed with diagrams in various ways including alternative layouts.

One major difference is that the printed book has hyphenation.

Some smartphone reader apps (e.g. Marvin, for iOS) provide automatic soft hyphenation, which neatly solves that problem without requiring any effort on the part of the publisher.

iBooks, as well.

FBReader on Android has decent hyphenation. Not TeX quality, but still pretty good.

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