Chopping up books when they're physically too big
attainablefelicity.mattkirkland.com
attainablefelicity.mattkirkland.com
It was something I had never considered. Not for a moment. Books were sacred to me. Cut one? Blasphemy.
But he was right. And so I cut it. And it fixed all of my complaints.
What I learned is that some folks have a different mindset; they see the world as something to be shaped around themselves, rather than seeing themselves as something that should be shaped to fit the world. That’s been a useful lesson sometimes.
It indeed is. Thanks for putting it in words. I think I will try to adopt this mindset about certain things in life.
When it fits, it may bring high achievement and self realization.
When misplaced, it may bring suffering and disillusionment.
One has to develop a grasp at when to use it.
But there is another more specific one in your context: objects are to be respected vs objects are to be useful.
My mother takes a lot of care of her objects. Her stuff lasts for very long.
Mine don't, but my life is much easier than hers because I don't think twice about making something dirty or worn. It's not alive; it's meant to make my life easier, we built it for it.
Again there is a balance: go too far and you get bad ROI out of your object.
But books fall very much into that category for me. I write on them, cut pages, turn them into a mess. They get a wild life, and then I discard them.
They are not trophies or decoration. They are not sacred.
And yet I may buy the same one 5 times for many friends, or just because I messed one up.
Like Boris Johnson did when he had fun times with a model on the campaign bus, then did a bizarre interview when he claimed he made model buses!
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/26/mesmerising...
It feels familiar but also kind of jarring.
That's a bold theory. Let's test it. Google results for "disney cryogenic":
Was Walt Disney frozen after death?
Walt Disney was cryogenically frozen : r/MandelaEffect
Walt Disney's Cryogenic Chamber - Myth and Folklore Wiki
How a strange rumor of Walt Disney's death became legend
The truth behind Walt Disney's frozen head
Was Walt Disney cryogenically frozen?
Fact or Fiction: Was Walt Disney Frozen?
What is the story behind the conspiracy theory that Walt Disney was cryogenically frozen?
Fortunately, she was kidding.
Buy another
https://www.reddit.com/r/lifehacks/comments/7sry7v/open_a_ha...
(which was a lesson in 2nd grade, when we got our first-ever hardcover textbooks)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHe2hx1JL7U
For some reason, the lessons learned stuck with me.
Oblig. XKCD:
(which I kind of wish was comic #1,000 so it was easy to remember/link)
Typical glued texts are more prone to this, but depending on the state of the glue, may go back so square if pressed when square to correct.
It came with annotations, some kids custom rules, their character sheets and the outline of a custom campaign they were writing. Its got so much texture.
Ebooks sync across devices, allow for a customized presentation, quick dictionary lookups, bookmarks, etc. The only slight edge I'll give to a physical book is the ability to easily make marginal notes in pencil -- I realize that ebooks have this feature too, it's just not as immediate or as frictionless.
That's equally true of print books. Misprints happen.
Parts V and VI were removed from the wife's version.
1. Letters That Produced Miraculous Results - cut because correspondence norms had massively changed between 1936 and 1981
2. Seven Rules for Making Your Home Life Happier - cut because its 1930s-era perspectives on marriage and domestic life didn't age that well
Personally, I think some of the edits in the remaining sections are more controversial than the removal of those two sections. I think the revision lost quite a bit of Dale's charm and just felt a bit less idiosyncratic in a bad way.
I wonder how you feel about it? Did you know about this video and I'd be curious to hear your response about it :-D
It made me realize that people might actually be scouring through the internet and the hackernews comments that we write along the way might even be showed by people to perhaps an even larger audience. Wow.
[0]: I Found the BANNED Chapter of "How To Win Friends and Influence People": [https://youtu.be/iGJ0W8s1ka0?t=281](https://youtu.be/iGJ0W8s1ka0?t=281)
* You own it forever
* Nothing to charge
* Don't have yet another screen to stare at
* Its the definitive way to collect books (similar in the sense of vinyl for music)
* Going to used bookstores is awesome
* Seeing your whole collection physically is awesome and can be a conversation starter
* Graphic novels/comics are still better physical
Not after what the submitter did.
Why does everyone advocating for physical always treat effective DRM as a given?
I have bought a lot of digital music in my life, and I own every bit of it as long as my copies exist, just like all the physical music I bought before (and converted to digital as soon as it was practical).
> * Nothing to charge
My e-readers last weeks of active use without charging, and I literally found a Kindle that had been lost for over a year a few weeks ago which still had over 30% charge because they take basically no power if they're not being used. Charging really is not a significant concern.
> * Don't have yet another screen to stare at
It's a very different type of screen, that doesn't have the same effect on your eyes and by its low-color low-refresh-rate nature really isn't easy to implement the sorts of attention-stealing anti-features that other screens often contain.
> * Its the definitive way to collect books (similar in the sense of vinyl for music)
Similar to vinyl, it's "definitive" to people who care more about how it looks on their shelf than actually enjoying the content. Pulling a beautiful hardcover off the shelf, setting it down, and opening it up is great of course, just like pulling a record off the shelf, sliding it out of the sleeve, placing it on the turntable, and setting the needle in place. Once you've done that however it's the same book, the same music, just a lot less convenient (and in the case of vinyl, objectively worse quality than a well-mastered high-quality digital release).
> * Going to used bookstores is awesome
No disagreement there. That said, if someone were to ever develop an ebook licensing system that allowed for arbitrary transfer and resale through third parties it would certainly be interesting to see what turned up in the "bargain bin" that way too. I'm not sure how such a thing could actually be possible and I'm not going to hold my breath for it to ever happen but the concept of resale is not inherently impossible in digital content.
> * Seeing your whole collection physically is awesome and can be a conversation starter
No argument there, my partner's game shelf takes up an entire wall in our house and has hundreds of giant colorful boxes covered in artwork. My Steam library has an order of magnitude more games in it but it's just a list on a screen that I can make show thumbnail images of what the cover would look like if it existed as a physical product.
That said, while I may not have the giant media racks we all drooled over in the '90s, the flip side of that is digital content takes up effectively zero space and weighs nothing. I drive around with my entire music library on a USB stick in my car every day and have for over a decade at this point. My e-reader has every single book I own on it with plenty of space to spare. My Steam Deck has enough space built in for dozens of modern games, and I also have a MicroSD card in it containing every single game for basically every 8/16 bit system ever produced, as well as my favorites of the 32 bit and beyond eras.
> * Graphic novels/comics are still better physical
Yeah color e-paper displays still have a LONG way to go before they can even think about the graphic novel market. That side of things is sort of like where digital music was in the era where MP3 players had storage measured in megabytes so you might not even get a full album without having to compress it to a point where you can definitely tell. It's possible to see the promise in the concept, but it's definitely not there yet (and unlike MP3 player capacity, we can't even assume the tech will get there eventually).
That said, it never occurred to me to just cut up my book, so I could continue to read it comfortably. I think I might have chosen to do so though, since I find the tactile nature of reading a physical book to be more memorable than digital. Where the words sit on the page, and the act of turning the page, the smell, all does something to my neurons. For my junk novels, I don't really care, but for the authors I cherish, the closer to the printed word I can get the better the experience I have, and the more memorable the writing in general.
Can't you dontate them to a library. Or take it from one in the first place..
A physical book, you encounter in physical space. Thus has a lot more chance to get read. The ebook, one has to take a device and press some button, before the book has even a chance of getting seen...
My ebooks typically get downloaded once, and sits forever unread in some device..
A physical book, I take from a lib and gets read automatically, unless it finds its way to the underside of some furniture...
That IMHO nullifies any convience that e-books have..
I have had Kindles since v1. And the pattern was always the same: Read some books and then get to a boring patch in one and stop and then dont read anything for 6-24mo.
When we had my son we decided we wanted to create an environment where he was more likely to make reading a habit (over touchscreen brainrot etc).
We figured the best way to do that would be to:
1. Make sure he saw us reading for pleasure, often. 2. We read to him regularly as a habit. 3. Create spaces ideal for reading. 4. Put books everywhere.
Even before you get to point 4, it’s clear that physical books are just simply the best possible solution.
So I just bought a ton of books, hooked Openclaw up to my Goodreads and had it regularly scan the inventory of local used bookstores, bought some bookcases, and set aside time every morning and evening to read.
And you know what, I’ve never read as much or enjoyed it as much as now. And I attribute it entirely to having a beautiful wall of books next to a nice comfortable chair right in the middle of the living room.
I see my book on my bedside table every day. It’s a book, not another device. Another nice benefit is when people come over we invariably end up standing in front of the book shelf talking about books. And then they often leave with one to borrow.
Physical books have their issues and drawbacks etc but they definitely have changed our family’s life for the better.
Buy the paperback for larping and performative reading. Get the epub from Anna's to actually read it.
I say all this not to try to convince you that you're wrong (it's all a matter of taste after all), but to point out that this isn't just nostalgia. People who read physical books actually prefer them, even if their reasons aren't things you find important.
1. Obsession with massive books.
2. High-value target (this community.)
3. Obviously bad idea that some people will treat as an earnest suggestion.
4. Oblique commentary on bad behavior by AI companies (destructive scanning of rare books.)
For a big book, cutting it up might be desired. Even though book lovers everywhere decry such a move, it's their book.
Obviously there is zero resale value for the book, but I have never sold a book I owned so that wouldn't bother me.
And, for several others, I have physically cut out and disposed of offending chapters or introductions using the same physical technique as the article suggests. Deeply emotionally satisfying, and not an option available for DRM e-books, as far as I know. And again, a book lover.
> not an option available for DRM e-books
One such instance for me was a computer game. I uninstalled it and ensured the offending files were securely written over. Such things were possible with spinning rust storage.
Nowadays with solid state drives I don't know how to target my vindication to that degree.
I didn't like that it was so thick, but it was a small book dimensionally. Plus it was just a cheap used paperback that would be read once. I dont like e-readers, i like to dog-ear the pages and stuff
Nice hardware concept, completely unacceptable software.
I don't have the urge to fight all my devices.
I’ve have had enough bookmarks fall out of the book that I have changed my strategy. Instead of using a bookmark I take a photo of the last page I was reading before closing the book. I then add the photo to favourites so it’s easier to find. And then later when I continue to read, I check in my camera roll to see what page I was on. With the current book I am reading I also like to end on the end of a chapter when I can. Easy to remember that next time I will start reading chapter 5 or whatever. And if I don’t have time or energy to read to the end of a chapter I still try to remember what page number I am on, just in case my phone runs out of battery and I want to continue reading.
Compare that entire rube goldberg machine with one button press on an e-reader.
[0] https://www.google.com/search?udm=2&q=%E6%9B%B8%E7%B1%8D%E5%...
[1] https://imgcp.aacdn.jp/img-a/800/auto/aa/gm/article/4/1/4/9/...
I solved this with small post-it notes I use as bookmarks. Some of my textbooks and recipe books have dozens of them, colour-coded. Very convenient.
For novels I just stopped using bookmarks. I open roughly where I left off, read a sentence. If the book is new or I read it last recently, it’s accurate to within a page or two. If I remember the sentence, I skip forward a couple of pages, otherwise I skip back. Occasionally I reread a paragraph I forgot. Otherwise it just reminds me of what was happening before a new reading session.
I read most fiction these days on my Kobo. I prefer physical volumes when I'm sitting at a desk.
1. Two page layout. This gives you more context when reading.
2. Imperfect printing. Older books have imperfect impressions of letters.
3. Tan colored background, which varies across the page and from page to page. Grey is so sterile.
4. Cannot stick a thumb on a page and flip forward and backward with your other thumb.
I still prefer ereaders for novels and most non-fiction books, though.
That was exactly the reason why I tried out the 12.9” iPad Pro back in like 2016. I used that for 8 years, and now am on my second.
<aside/>I lost interest in programming for pleasure (thank you LLMs), so decided to spend a few years learning all the prerequisites to understand the General Theory of Relativity.
It is so nice to get back to learning from printed matter. The contrast is great. The ability to flip pages back and forth to scan past material is much better than an ebook experience (like referring to a figure on a different page). Best of all, I don't get distracted or tempted to open up a browser window and start doomscrolling. The heft is oddly reassuring too.
In fact - many old huge books are epic. I remember in the early 1990s we had a huge book about history. It detailed each year with the most important events. I loved reading in it. Even today I like it.
Unfortunately I am also now part of the digital-only guys, so I have not bought a hardcopy paper books in quite a while (excluding one exception for Raymond Feist, but by and large I only read .pdf files nowadays). So I store things in .pdf files mostly. I also hate .epub files and refuse to use them.
I still have many old books here, but new books rarely come up and I only keep books I find interesting or important or I may re-read. For instance I have one small hardcopy of 1984; I think it is an important book. And a few more like that. But I barely have any new paper books.
I don't presently have any really huge book. Not sure what I will do should I inherit huge books. On the one hand, having them is kind of cool, but I don't want to keep them in a library or shelf either, so ... I will probably not use it. But I would not chop up any book, not even on a first april. It just seems totally pointless and also defeats the point of having huge books. Huge books are kind of cool. Not practical but cool.
If you can't figure out how to read a large book in comfort that seems like a you problem. It's up to you what you do with (or rather, to) your books but don't ask me to applaud you for being clever.
Applause!!!!
Isn’t that exactly what he did?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookbinding#text-block
Cover => recto/verso => Endleaf => Textblock{ signatures... } => ...then back to endleaf + cover like a sandwich.
I started with cereal boxes and old wrapping paper and have graduated to fancier wrapping paper and bookbinding board (stiffer, like matte-board).
The great benefit of doing something like this is being able to glue one of those cool ribbons into the spine for use as a bookmark!
You can have a book printed in the 1970s and it will be half the thickness, and shorter height. It has the exact same content as a modern book. At some point we went from the average number of pages being somewhere around 200-250 to over 400. You don't actually get more words, they just take up more pages. Paper type might also make a difference, I have 60 year old books with ~250 page, they are half the thickness of a modern murder mystery with around 400 pages, and the old book is hardback, the new one is paperback.
I think it's vanity, people would rather be seen reading a brick of a book, regardless of the actual content. Even if the old hardbacks are easier to handle and carry in your backpack.
I have faced the problem of books being too big. What I do is I just get an additional copy on my Kindle. For classics this is free, for newer ones, the price is one-sixth to one-third. This is justified because the need is rare.
I read the physical book during the daytime at my home. I travel with the Kindle and take it to my bed.
> I recommend buying your own books for language learning. They can be spiced with underlines, question marks, and exclamation points; they can be thumbed and dog-eared, plucked to their essential core, and annotated so that they become a mirror of yourself.
> What shall you write in the margins? Only the forms and phrases you have understood and figured out from the context.
> Ignore what you can’t immediately understand. If a word is important, it will occur several times and explain itself anyway. Base your progress on the known, not the un- known. The more you read, the more phrases you will write in the margins. The relationship that develops between you and the knowledge you obtain will be much deeper than if you had consulted the dictionary automatically. The sense of achievement provides you with an emotional-affective charge: You have sprung open a lock; you have solved a little puzzle.
I can't really bring myself to write in the books themselves though, so I've been using separate paper. It feels wrong, even in a cheap book, like I'm defiling it.
My personal working theory:
Native speakers learn to speak first, then they learn to read and write.
From talking with high-level ESOL speakers, those that learned from written material have some very strange patterns of mistakes you can hear in their English - where they've programmed their pronunciation incorrectly very early on with basic mistakes.
Although English is an outlier here. Because English native speakers learn lots of different ways to manage how speaking and spelling are different. Plus because making speaking mistakes after learning words in books is such a social status mistake.
Personally I think if you want to learn a language, the ideal is with someone who corrects all mistakes, as though one is a baby. Although it is difficult to find this even when one can spend months in a foreign country. Not everyone feels comfortable correcting an adult.
The people that have learned English that I have spoken with that are the best all have a common trait: they've lived in a country and they MIMIC. The most amazing was a hippy Japanese guy: I remember one sentence where he shifted in the middle from broad East London to a strong Aussie accent due to where he learned the words.
I learnt conversational Spanish when I was 30. Next attempt will be 2-3 months immersed Korean as a middle aged guy so I'm looking forward to trying out my opinions!
My natural bent is strongly focused on reading and words. Learning by talking and mimicking is not my strength at all.
I suspect that is why I've noticed the pattern that natural mimickers are the ideal language learners (who I would like to emulate).
Although my beliefs are incoherent... I want software that starts with substituted latin letters into a Korean layout that slowly morphs into Korean (maybe choosing words carefully that have been taken from English).
A la Meihem In Ce Klasrum by Dolton Edwards: https://www.ecphorizer.com/EPS/site_page.php?issue=7&page=29
I wonder what mine is. I feel like I don't take to reading in a foreign language too easily (though I have trouble focusing on reading generally), but I definitely struggle mimicking as well. Some times I really wonder how I learned French at all, I got to my current level of ability quite quickly, though I'm sorely lacking a lot of fundamentals both in writing and in speech.
I agree though, you can see a big difference in language learners on Youtube between those who practice speech vs those who mostly read. For example, Alexander Argüelles [1] is a famous polyglot who's written quite a few foreign-language grammar books, but the few videos of him speaking show his heavy accent.
For Korean, I wouldn't bother with Latin letters. Hangul is simple:
> A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; even a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days.
– King Sejong on (what would become known as) Hangul
Reading in Korean would have been quite difficult historically, when it was mixed with Chinese characters à la Japanese [2], eg.
> 悠久한 歷史와 傳統에 빛나는 우리 大韓國民은 3⸱1 運動으로 建立된 大韓民國臨時政府의 法統과 不義에 抗拒한 4⸱19 民主理念을 繼承하고, 祖國의 民主改革과 平和的統一의 使命에 立脚하여 正義⸱人道와 同胞愛로써 民族의 團結을 鞏固히 하고, 모든 社會的弊習과 不義를 打破하며, 自律과 調和를 바탕으로 自由民主的基本秩序를 더욱 確固히 하여 政治⸱經濟⸱社會
You probably have some natural ability - or even just drive given your interest. Interests and abilities often hold hands.
The the other major issue with languages is that our teaching methods are rather hit and miss.
This is interesting: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2008/sep/02/languages.... -- although I cynically worry that he was perhaps rather better at selling himself than doing teaching.
> For Korean, I wouldn't bother with Latin letters. Hangul is simple
I've poorly and unclearly explained the idea sorry. Writing is hard.
I do enjoy a very limited number of hardcovers from my most favorite stories from my favorite authors. Great for curling up in bed with.
Paperback is fine, even in the trade paperback sizes now. Though some authors like Brandon Sanderson don't make novels but bookzillas, and I've thought more than once of getting used copies to split for easier carrying.
As a kid I loved "pocket books"[1] because they didn't make my hand feel weak trying to hold them on a road trip and I could fit a few in my backpack.
But, obviously, not every work was published in a pocket book format.
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/articles/end-mass-market-pap...
Last year, ReaderLink, the country's largest distributor of books to airports, pharmacies and big-box stores, announced that it would no longer carry mass markets. The books can still be found in some places, but "as a format, I would say it's pretty much over," Ivan Held, the president of publishing imprints Putnam, Dutton and Berkley, said to the Times.
I too mourn them - much more of a convenient size than the now ubiquitous ‘trade paperback’ - but we’re obviously in a small minority.
Nevertheless I could see doing this with old books where the pages are aleady coming out
Also I might enjoy the digital version of this, breaking up a PDF into smaller bite-sized chapters into a folder
Some, like dickens, just write too long (though he had an excuse, being paid by the word, and in many cases being paid as he worked). Pynchon and Stephenson too. But it feels like Wolfe kept his books short, or at least shorter than they probably started out!
You mean, like on Reddit? ;)
For another comparison, the Bible is around three quarters of a million words, and tends to use special paper (20–40gsm/30–50 micron) so it works in one volume.
Handwriting is also a good idea for encouraging keeping lengths down; typing and dictation make verbosity too easy; and as for LLMs, words are clearly far too cheap there.
Eh? What sort of a pretend-reader does that? You must read nothing more than a page at a time.
I have the Diary of Pepys beside the bed and it’s the excerpts, at only about 1000 pages. Enjoying it tremendously.
You may love it, but your friend may hate it.
Keep it for yourself.
My wife assumed it must have been a joke post!
That's what machine generation tries to devalue and bury. Infinite recreations, infinite approximations, with no original to compare to. The perfect tool of someone who wishes to create a reality of their own bias rather than one that is a result of all who came before them.