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Comment by TedDoesntTalk | Hacker News Reader

Still not easy to skim, flip through e readers. Especially remarkable which is damn slow to turn and render a page.

What I don’t get from e-readers is a good sense of location. With a book or magazine I get a feeling of moving through a 3D object. As I move through and the right side gets thinner and the left thicker it gives each place a different feel.

Later if I want to find something in the book my memory of it includes that feel, which helps get to the right general area easily. I’ll also often remember if it was on a left or right page, and if it was near any particular graphics.

yeah that's one of the many reasons i don't like reading textbooks or anything substantial on a computer

My Kobo has a little progress bar across the bottom if I tap the screen. That scratches the itch for me.

True - I miss looking at bookshelves of myself and friends / colleagues / libraries to discover new stuff spontaneously too.

Still, I can take what would have been a big stack of paper with me to the coffee shop / park / forest and like the ability to search for text strings.

Maybe I should see if there is a 'give me a random page' button in my software or if a spotify / netflix style recommendation engine would work well for books and papers.

Have never seen a remarkable in the flesh, though that would annoy me.

If you could build a physical book that had e-reader pages (and took no power to read), that would solve some of the issue(s) both have.

Its nice that you have a stack of books, but I also don't really want a stack of books even in tiny form factor. I want, maybe one or two books at a time, and I don't want to worry about them getting stolen/dropped/spilled on/not being charged/need an account to login to. I also don't want to search on a tiny bad UI for which book it is I actually want to read.

So for me e-readers remain a non-starter. Give me a real book any day. IFF I want to search it I have a tablet if I'm doing work or taking a note on it. And other than leaving it behind, I'm not afraid of someone swiping it when I order another coffee.

“ If you could build a physical book that had e-reader pages (and took no power to read), that would solve some of the issue(s) both have.”

Check out the physical ebook for Fist of the North Star as an example of this:

https://goodereader.com/blog/reviews/hands-on-review-of-the-...

Sometimes I’ve thought of creating physical cards or a binder or something like that which would act as a physical representation of my digital ebook library so that I and others could quickly peruse it.

And then try to read an Archive.org PDF. Every page is compressed with JPEG2000, and the tiny application processor in an ereader can take 10 seconds or more per page to render. Files archived over 10 years ago use DjVu which is near-instant, but they don't generate those any more.

DjVu was such a wonderful technology.

Sadly you can't even make the hyper-efficient IA-style DjVus yourself because the MRC (mixed raster content) compressor they use is proprietary to LizardTech and there's no open source equivalent. So even if you wanted to re-render the file to put into an ereader with the same readability, it'll be huge (like 500MB vs 10MB).

The best thing you can do is just delete the JPX layer because it's probably just the background of the page. It'll destroy non-bitonal images, but the book will render literally about 1000 times faster.

Keeping that compressor locked away probably killed the format because PDF can package up a straight image compression just as well, but the JPX decompression is a dog.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_raster_content

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