Forums » Smalltalk » Things to bring back in books

Maps and graphs are absolutely one of my favorite things in books. I always find myself making my way back to them and mapping out where characters have been.

I'd like the maps if they were a bit bigger to read. I've tried to follow the book I'm reading at the time, going back to the map to look things over, and it's so small and I squint...so I give up.

The list above literally depends on the publisher, the subject of the book, and the author's effort to add in that extra bit of information to help his readers understand what he's writing about. I have purchased recently published books that include the elements the list refers to so they haven't actually been absent.

What I would like to see resolved are stronger covers and a sound assemble of the spine so pages don't drop out, or the spine cracks if you attempt to open the book a little wider to read the small print some publishers are now obsessed with.

I have some books that are both the normal, like what's listed in the image above, and then I have some which are not the normal.

Example: Ready Player Two by Ernest Cline, author of Ready Player One, the back is nothing but praising the book by famous people/groups on how great the book is.

So it's half n half as I see it, for how the books are. But I also agree with you, that they need to use a slightly larger print. Teeny tiny print doesn't do anyone any good, except ruin their eye sight and give their eye doctor a huge raise by visiting them.

I've noticed that hardbacks tend to put the synopsis on the inner folds of the jacket, and just reviews on the back.

Things like chapter titles, indices, maps, etc have always seemed to depend on whether or not the author provided any to include. I've always wished some of those things were more common.

I did recently get a reminder of something I apparently said a few years ago that seems somewhat relevant, though. Apparently, I posted that if I ever managed to become a famous author, I didn't ever want my name to be printed larger than the book title. I've seen that a lot. Gigantic author name, have to search the cover to figure out what the book is even called.

People names tend to be pretty useless to me. They don't stay in my head very well. It's also uncommon for me to make any attempt to find other works by the same creator(s), let alone to buy anything primarily because of who that is.

I did not know he wrote a second book in the Ready Player One vein.... interesting

I didn't know either, till I randomly spotted it at WalMart. But it's real. And it's scary in a sense, to me, because of how close/similar things in that book are to us in rl.

Interesting!! And yes, it is a little shivery-feeling to realize that the book was written in 2011, and we're pretty close to the situation in it! Heh. Although if we're being fair, Sword Art Online had the haptic face gear before Eric Cline did, I'm pretty sure.

Have you read any Bradbury, @Winters Fury?

And to stay on topic, I think good ink and paper are very nice for a book, but I suppose they might be difficult to come by. However, having a pretty, well-spaced typeface can't be too hard, right? Haha. I like a nice Roman-something-style font. Very comfortable to read.
And well-stitched covers, I agree, are very useful! Or well-glued, even! Or... well-stapled?

Fun fact, actually! It's admittedly been awhile since I had Typography or any other design classes, so I don't know if there's been further research that might counter it, but what evidence showed that I was taught was that, for some reason, people typically have an easier time reading serif typefaces (Times New Roman, Georgia, Garamond, Baskerville, Bookman, Palatino, etc) in print, but an easier time reading sans-serif typefaces (Arial, Helvetica, Futura, Calibri, Verdana, Tahoma, etc) on screens.

That makes sense to me, I suppose! Thank you for the information. I really like reading about that sort of stuff. I once saw an anime where the one-time-editor-and-overseer of part of a book company was inner-monologuing about a type of book backing and typeface. It was really cool.