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Comment by guidoism | Hacker News Reader

Good. I hope authors start writing more succinctly.

There are weird differences between publishers in different countries.

In Poland there is this weird contest of making books largest possible. Mandatory points are huge font, enormous margins, huge spaces between paragraphs and chapters always starting from new page. Preferably with some graphic on half of such starting page. Magnified if it's a children's book. Also polish stylistics use new line for each character speaking so short conversations can take many lines.

It is shocking when you take same book released in UK or US. It looks like at least cut in HALF and actually much easier to read.

Similar in France, books are enormous - huge fonts, very wide margins everywhere, thick paper. The French editions of A Song of Ice and Fire are spread in more (IIRC all books after the first one are split in two) and bigger books than the English ones. It's a horrible waste.

Meanwhile there are "pocket" editions that are on the small side, but better.

The only positive excuse i can find is that publishers consider that the majority of their readers would be older and with poor vision, so bigger books.

>Similar in France, books are enormous - huge fonts.

One thing I appreciate in portuguese books is the font size. All the books I order from the UK have a smaller font than what I'd want to read after work.

I don't think the rest changes.

Similar to what happens in Germany. But there are somewhat technical details to consider, which drive this tendency:

Both German and French have longer words statistically, so a translation of e.g. a 500 page English book might result in 650-700 pages after translation. Now publishers have to ponder the question wether that's still a "handy" book or if they should split it into two.

And now happens, what we see: books with 300-350 pages look a bit small, so they increase the font size, expand the whitespace and, voila: two "decent" sized books where they "accidentally" increased their revenue too, because they can sell two books.

Harry Potter was the first one to do this. It was really funny, make little kids feel big and proud of reading a huge book so fast, like takes up so much bookshelf, big impressive book. Dude 1.5 point margins, not double spaced because then people notice, big fucking big fucking characters (which isn't terrible, it was in fact easier to read, squinting is harmful), and then like tons of chapters like not 12 like Cien años de soledad no lots of chapters, I got lobotomized so my memories are kinda fucked but to the best of that lobotomized memory the first Harry Potter had like 45 chapters. Chapters are great because every chapter means you get a break...a pagebreak.

> Also polish stylistics use new line for each character speaking so short conversations can take many lines.

That's pretty much universal in modern English books, too, and I've seen it given as a rule in several places.

I'm not sure about other languages and other times, but first editions of Kafka definitely have some long paragraphs: https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Der_Prozess/1._Kapitel

That is actually new to me, but maybe because I'm into sci-fi from around 1950-1970, where direct conversations between characters are just "quoted sentences" inside narrator sentences.

I'm a bit of Philip K. Dick fan and have "A Scanner Darkly" in two languages. Polish version is 150 pages more, an inch wider and an inch taller in size. Not that PKD elaborate language would justify more flourish translation, he was very "straight to the point". It's such a waste.

Having grown up in a sci-fi family and married into a Polish one, it's been an experience relearning how to pronounce "Stanislaw Lem"...

I would actually appreciate larger font and graphics in English books, it would be easier on the eyes. in return they could drop all the filler and repetition in nonfiction books. Fiction books often could also use some editing.

Not sure why that's downvoted; I'm a slow reader and frequently annoyed at how excessively verbose too many books these days are. SciFi books from a couple of decades ago were much shorter and often better than SciFi books today. I like books that get to the point and tell me straight up what they're about and what the central idea of it is.

As noted in the article, usually they just use shitty thin paper.

You were thinking of Neal Stephenson, right?

That wouldn't fix his endings.

There's nothing to fix, because he has no endings.

Not only that, his books got erased in a lobotomy, so it really was a complete wasted of time to read Snow Crash. That or it was too good, I knew too much.

Do you not want your novels bo be loccuatious?

*loquacious (unless this is intended as a meta-joke)

Well I'm sure there's a meta joke in my phone auto incorrecting loquacious to a word that doesn't seem to exist.

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