Ben Crowder / Blog

Blog: #reading

I’ve been playing around with making EPUBs look more like print:

Two book pages. At left is a page from a digital PDF. At right is the same page but modified to look less digital.

Why the madness: ebooks feel kind of sterile to me, and I’m intrigued by the idea of giving them a more analog feel.

The experiment is still early on (I’ve only automated the first step so far), but at this point the process involves:

  1. Turning the EPUB into a PDF (concatenating each file in the EPUB into a single HTML file, setting some print CSS rules, and printing from HTML to PDF in a browser)
  2. Turning each page into an image (at left in the above image)
  3. Eroding/dilating the image to simulate ink spread
  4. Adding a very slight ripple
  5. Blurring the next page, flipping it backwards, and compositing it at a low opacity
  6. Adding some paper texture (at right in the above image)
  7. Compiling all the page images back into a PDF

Other notes:

  • This does mean larger file sizes, but not prohibitively so. (For me, anyway.)
  • Right now I’m experimenting with doing this statically, in PDF but I imagine most if not all of it could be done dynamically in-browser. (filter: blur(0.25px) contrast(3) in CSS applied twice to text can give a roughly similar effect to erosion/dilation, for example.)
  • The current erosion/dilation method is acceptable, but I feel like there’s more room for improvement here.
  • A shortcut to doing the full process is to export a blurred backwards page image, composite it onto the paper texture, and then use that as the background image on each page. You lose the variety, but it’s probably not noticeable.

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Favorite books in 2023

My favorite reads this year, in the order I read them:

Nonfiction

  • The Perfectionists, by Simon Winchester
  • The Soul of a New Machine, by Tracy Kidder
  • First, by Evan Thomas
  • All the President’s Men, by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
  • The River of Doubt, by Candice Millard
  • Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson
  • Convictions, by John Kroger
  • Indigenous Continent, by Pekka Hämäläinen
  • When the Heavens Went on Sale, by Ashlee Vance
  • Let’s Talk About Race and Priesthood, by W. Paul Reeve
  • Leadership, by Doris Kearns Goodwin
  • Avid Reader, by Robert Gottlieb
  • Ways of Being, by James Bridle
  • In the Garden of Beasts, by Erik Larson

Fiction

  • Memory, by Lois McMaster Bujold
  • The Justice of Kings, by Richard Swan
  • The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison
  • Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold
  • The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows
  • The Will of the Many, by James Islington
  • In the Woods, by Tana French
  • Blood Over Bright Haven, by M. L. Wang
  • Cage of Souls, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
  • Memories of Ice, by Steven Erikson
  • The Return of Fitzroy Angursell, by Victoria Goddard
  • Chosen, by Benedict Jacka
  • Made Things, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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Favorite books in 2022

My favorite reads last year, in the order I read them (and I won’t go into detail on these because I’ve already written about them in earlier posts):

Nonfiction

  • The Golden Thread, by Kassia St. Clair
  • The Cubans, by Anthony DePalma
  • The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber & David Wengrow
  • Stretching the Heavens, by Terryl L. Givens
  • This Changes Everything, by Naomi Klein
  • The Invention of Nature, by Andrea Wulf
  • The Sixth Extinction, by Elizabeth Kolbert
  • The Plantagenets, by Dan Jones
  • How the Word Is Passed, by Clint Smith
  • Human Errors, by Nathan H. Lents
  • I Wish I’d Been There, edited by Byron Hollinshead
  • Extra Life, by Steven Johnson

Fiction

  • Ring Shout, by P. Djèlí Clark
  • Network Effect, by Martha Wells
  • The Curse of Chalion, by Lois McMaster Bujold
  • Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor
  • The Hands of the Emperor, by Victoria Goddard
  • Babel, by R. F. Kuang
  • Ogres, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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Reading stats for 2022

I see this recap as a way to be at least a little more conscious of how and what I’m reading. (Some things are easier to see in the aggregate.) Also cf. last year’s stats.

In 2022 I read an even 100 books, a number I achieved largely because I stacked the end with novellas. I have no shame. There were also 37 books I decided not to finish. (Those abandoned books are, however, included in the count of 36,440 pages that I read, to provide a slightly more accurate picture.)

Of the 100 that endured to the end:

  • 55% were fiction and 45% were nonfiction
  • Of the fiction, and acknowledging that genre boundaries aren’t always clear cut, the genres were: 53% fantasy (29 books), 35% science fiction (19), 7% horror (4), 4% classics (2), and 1% general fiction (1)
  • 39% of the 100 had at least one female author, 61% did not
  • 14% were written before 2010 (9% were before 2000 and 4% before 1900)
  • A whopping 54% were written in the last three years (18 from 2020, 19 from 2021, 17 from 2022)
  • The earliest book I read in 2022 was written around A.D. 731 (go Bede), roughly thirteen hundred years earlier

After looking at this, I’ve got a microresolution to get myself to read more old books this new year, so that I’m not skewing quite so much toward the hyper-recent.


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For those who feel inclined to reply via email: what was the best book you read this year? Any genre.


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Things I’ve found helpful when reading hard/old books:

  • Slow down
  • Speed up
  • Read out loud (or subvocalize)
  • Make the font larger (or zoom in, or move the book closer)

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Links #28


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