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Ask HN: Is it hard for you to read a thick book?
I've heard that modern people can't read a book without thinking about some smartphone service that gives them a dopamine hit. Is it possible to have a smartphone and still enjoy reading thick books? Especially if you're young and don't remember a world before smartphones.
- ggm 1y agoI enjoy kindles because i can adjust point size. I don't miss paper, and I don't worry about the length of the written word. I do find my concentration has lapsed somewhat, I read in small chunks but I do read to the end. Mostly. What I want is >600dpi e-ink. We've been stuck in 200dpi for a long time. And I would prefer a form factor closer to classic paperback. Boox may come close. Colour boox is 160dpi so is worse, and I'm told the contrast isn't great. Kindles are crap at illustrations. For context, I grew up in an academic household in the 60s and 70s with over 10,000 books of all kinds, and I married a bookseller and we had 5,000 or so at home until the last decade when we downsized. We now have a few hundred kept for sentimental reasons, under 1,000. We both almost exclusively read kindles. Old eyes prefer larger font.
- eimrine 1y agoOf course it is acceptable to read books in chunks, for example I have read a 400-page book with processing of every link in a week. But why has your concentration lapsed? And is it possible to open 2 copies of the same book on your ebook reader - first one for the story and second one for the links in the end of the pages?
- ggm 1y ago>But why has your concentration lapsed? Age? Could be the real effect of attention seeking alternates, lack of time in flow reading without distractions, I'm not saying there's nothing at all in the "people can't read at length any more" story. >And is it possible to open 2 copies of the same book on your ebook reader - first one for the story and second one for the links in the end of the pages? On my kindle e-ink devices there appears to be no way to do this, to the extent you can mark place in multiple books, it's books at rest: you cannot be in two places at once. However you can set bookmarks (top right page marker interaction) and footnotes are paired hyperlinks back to their reference point. What you suggest should be possible in a well designed system.
- haebom 1y agoI also grew up in a home filled with books when I was young. Reading was my parents' favorite thing about me, and I benefited greatly from it. I think the recent difficulty people have with reading books stems less from dopamine addiction and more from the sheer abundance of content more appealing than books. Even when books were mainstream, there were always people who preferred television or comic books. Nowadays, it's even common for people to buy books based solely on the title and author, then take a photo of their purchase and upload it to social media as their goal. I heard from a friend who works at a publishing company that these days, books written by influencers sell better than those written by professors or experts.
- ljf 1y agoThis is very true for me. If I wanted to throw myself into a weird or surreal story - grabbing a book was often the only place I could get that hit as a teenager in the 90s - we didn't even have a vcr for ages, so the only other places were live TV or radio (or the theatre too I guess). now there are so many places to scratch the exact itch of today's interest. Books are still great, but as an adult with less free time - I find myself falling for the quick hits more readily.
- eimrine 1y agoWhat can be more appealing than reading any of the greatest books ever? You can have unlimited number of them for free nowadays. You can dive really deep in anything. You can download, I don't know, all 114 books by Noam Chomsky for free, you can have hundreds of Math books, you can read such the books which make consuming information from media unneeded. What can be more interesting than downloading 1Tb of books and just reading them every morning and evening?