I’ve been playing around with making EPUBs look more like print:
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:
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)
Turning each page into an image (at left in the above image)
Eroding/dilating the image to simulate ink spread
Adding a very slight ripple
Blurring the next page, flipping it backwards, and compositing it at a low opacity
Adding some paper texture (at right in the above image)
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.
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.
