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Comment by sofixa | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

>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.

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.

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