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Comment by nindalf | Hacker News Reader

I prefer reading on my e-reader for a number of reasons you’ve probably come across elsewhere. But the most underrated thing for me is that I can read large books. I feel they’re too unwieldly to carry around and also heavy enough that I feel too much friction actually starting to read. I had The Gene on my shelf for 3 years before I realised this was why I hadn’t even read 10 pages of it. I bought the ebook and finished it within 4 days.

This opened up a side benefit. I find that my enjoyment of things is enhanced when I can share it with someone. Since I have the ebook, I can gift the physical book to a friend who I think will like the book. That’s what happens to most of the physical books I receive as gifts - I buy the ebook, read it, then gift the physical book so I can share the joy with someone else.

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There seems to be a weird reluctance in the American publishing market to split larger books into volumes. "War and Peace" editions I see on Amazon are typically single-volume; Russian editions are either two or four volumes.

Unfortunately, translated books are (in most cases) published in the same way as the original, so the tradition of multi-volume editions is dying out, being replaced by these awful bricks you can't properly hold or keep open, all set in tiny type with narrow margins.

I think part of that is the fractured expectations that publishers have set upon readers, especially of these longer classics. You have all these editions, translations, etc., sometimes of dramatically different page number lengths, with no standard or clear way to differentiate between different printings without diving into some literature forum where the users have read both copies and can summarize these differences for you. It can be hard to know you are actually getting the whole thing without buying a huge tome explicitly.

Nah, it’s just cheaper to print (small type), bind (once, and badly), and to manage inventory in some edge cases.

I agree about large books. I bought my first Kobo specifically for reading Alan Moore's Jerusalem (1400 pages). It went great.

Once I bought a used copy of a 1200+ page book and took the binding off so I could carry a couple of chapters at a time back and forth to work to read on breaks. Luckily it was a 10+ year old history book that was available shipped for under $10. But I can't really do that for a library book, so I agree ebooks are the way to go.

> The Gene

I read this book but i had to take huge amounts of notes/scribbles on the pages to keep track of various acronyms. I go back and lookup stuff that i forgot about. I thin an ereader is less amenable to going back forth and refer things. I feel like ereaders are designed more for linear reading .

Look into Kindle X-Ray [1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Ray_(Amazon_Kindle)

X-Ray is great, if your title supports it. I did find it to be a bit of a spoiler, since it shows you all the occurrences of a character in the book - including in the future (?) - at least this is how I recall it.

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