Quote:
Originally Posted by BearMountainBooks
I think it would be harder to read non-conventional stuff on an ereader. I don't have problems with double spaces between paragraphs (which happens for ereaders for some books or shorts and there are various technical reasons for it) but the lack of quotes might make it very unreadable for me on an ereader.
The books that didn't have quotes that I did read were back in the paper days. I haven't come across any on ereader.
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Hi:
I do think it could be harder. When you're reading McCarthy, in print, and you get to the end of a paragraph, sans closing quotes, you can glance back and see where/who you are, and determine if the speaker is done speaking, or if the next paragraph should be inferred to be the next speaker, or a continuation of the previous, etc. If you're looking at the last half of a paragraph, on a recto (right-hand) page, for example. McCarthy's pretty clear, so he's likely not the best exemplar, but you know what I mean.
But if you have that same issue on an e-reader, you have to click-page back, to see where you are. I think it's the inability to do a quick glance at the previous "page," if I try to think about it; that glancing back is something most of us do so (almost) autonomically, like breathing, that we don't think about it until we have to click back to see the prior page.
That's not very clearly stated, but when I think about how I feel about lack of dialogue tags, quotation marks, etc., on an ebook, I definitely do have a more negative reaction than I do for print. And I believe it's due to the constrained reading space, vis-a-vis quick visual cues. It's one thing to keep glancing back a single page, to figure out who's speaking to whom, but if I have to
keep clicking back...yes, that would eventually frustrate me enough to yank me out of the story/book/novel.
FWIW.
Hitch