Why you should read War and Peace on your phone

[PeterT]

Why you should read War and Peace on your phone

It's a cliché that Tolstoy's War and Peace is a difficult book. At over a thousand pages and half a million words, it's physically imposing.

"I would go to the bookstore and pick up something like War and Peace and I would go, well this is really really heavy and it's the size of a door stop. If I get this I'll sit at home and read it a little bit but I won't be able to carry it around with me. And if I can't carry it around with me, I'm not going to read it."

That was the view of Clive Thompson, a tech journalist and author.
...
While he eventually found it possible to read the tome, Clive still longed for certain aspects of traditional books. "Everything is trying to drive me away from this book. I mean, a paper book is so much superior aesthetically."

"Sometimes I still wish, I feel like, maybe there's something that will eventually emerge technologically that will give electronic books something closer to the wonderful, gorgeous ergonomics and haptics of paper books. Each of them also has something that the other lacks."
...

[JSWolf]

Clive Thompson is an idiot.

[PeterT]

I think he should try on a real eReader as opposed to a phone.

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Clive Thompson is an idiot.

I don't often do it, but I agree with the Wolf here.

If I understood the article correctly, it essentially said "digital books enabled me to read a book that is otherwise too bulky and cumbersome in a paper format. It's just a shame the book wasn't in a paper format."

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

I don't often do it, but I agree with the Wolf here.

If I understood the article correctly, it essentially said "digital books enabled me to read a book that is otherwise too bulky and cumbersome in a paper format. It's just a shame the book wasn't in a paper format."

Mobileread may crash since I am agreeing with you and the Wolf.

[ottdmk]

Oh great. Now I'm going to be looking around all day for more signs of the Apocalypse... :-P

I agree with PeterT. This guy should try reading on an actual eReader.

[Deskisamess]

Can you always drive a truck through the holes in Clive’s logic?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Deskisamess

Can you always drive a truck through the holes in Clive’s logic?

You can drive the Starship Enterprise through his illogic.

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by ZodWallop

If I understood the article correctly, it essentially said "digital books enabled me to read a book that is otherwise too bulky and cumbersome in a paper format. It's just a shame the book wasn't in a paper format."

It's worse than that. He also wrote:
"Sometimes I still wish, I feel like, maybe there's something that will eventually emerge technologically that will give electronic books something closer to the wonderful, gorgeous ergonomics and haptics of paper books."

How can something "too bulky and cumbersome" have "wonderful, gorgeous ergonomics"?

[ZodWallop]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

It's worse than that. He also wrote:
"Sometimes I still wish, I feel like, maybe there's something that will eventually emerge technologically that will give electronic books something closer to the wonderful, gorgeous ergonomics and haptics of paper books."

My thought was "It's called an e-reader, stupid!" (I wasn't in a generous mood as I read his poorly thought-out post.)

I think what we need is flexible e-ink screens that are paper thin and can display on both sides. Then, we could bundle a large number of these paper-thin pages between some sort of cover...

How can something "too bulky and cumbersome" have "wonderful, gorgeous ergonomics"?

Yeah, that struck me as funny too.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

You can drive the Starship Enterprise through his illogic.

No, you can't, because you'll kill Spock because of the stress of being in such an illogical place and Data will crash because the fact of wanting an e-book so as to forgo having to use a very large paper book and then complaining about the e-book not being a paper book doesn't compute.

I'm sure that sentence will make your brain hurt. I'm still not certain it's grammatically correct, by the way...

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

No, you can't, because you'll kill Spock because of the stress of being in such an illogical place and Data will crash because the fact of wanting an e-book so as to forgo having to use a very large paper book and then complaining about the e-book not being a paper book doesn't compute.

I'm sure that sentence will make your brain hurt. I'm still not certain it's grammatically correct, by the way...

Your sentence made perfect sense. We don't want to kill Spock and fry Data's circuits.

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by Cinisajoy

Your sentence made perfect sense. We don't want to kill Spock and fry Data's circuits.

Neither do we want to fry Spock and kill Data...

And I like ereaders because I can have a book with a beautiful leather cover, be it a simple harlequin (is that how you spell it?) or a huge book consisting of 20000 pages...

[crich70]

I have to agree with JSWolf, ZodWallop and Cinisajoy. While ereader's still don't look like a traditional book I'd rather lug around 8oz of electronics than 1-2 lbs of paper, ink and glue. Plus at a couple inches thick a book like War and Peace is hard to hold open in paper. Not so with an ebook edition. Maybe one day there will be ereaders that have pages like a traditional paper book but until that day comes the present ereaders aren't doing that badly as a media either.

[JSWolf]

What is the best edition of War and Peace?