Tag Archives: type

There are more than ten types of people who read books

2018-01-15

People who read books have their own reading habits independent of the book format they like. Pages of paper books can be folded and highlighted, whereas notes can be jotted down on pages of an ebook (that don’t destroy the actual page) and highlighted as well. Someone may like to read in bath and another in bed. Riveted has identified ten types of book readers – but there are more.

Careful Page Turner. Books are so precious objects for this type of reader that even after reading a book, it looks like new.

Page folder. Books are full of memories and important things to note and remember. Every earmarked page has something to say to this reader.

Highlighter. Earmarking pages is not enough for this type of reader who wants to underline and highlight terms and lines.

Ebook user. Computers, tablets, ereaders and smartphones have users (unlike books that have readers), who read electronic books from the screen.

Paperback reader. In countries where ebooks have taken a large market share, sales of paperbacks has fallen, but there are still plenty paperback readers. Paperbacks are the classic choice of travelers, largely replaced today by ereader devices.

Hardcover lover. Book, music and movie industries have something in common: they can sell the same product many times to same customers, only in different package. Hardcover books have retained their market share despite ebooks (or paperbacks) that often are priced lower than hardcover products.

Library Hermit. With an endless supply of free books (and nowadays also the internet), it is easy to understand why some people like to spend hours in libraries.

Story Hoarder. A reader starts reading a story, but something makes him or her jump to the next book without finishing the first one. Some readers have he ability to jump from one story to the next without difficulties. I can do it with nonfiction books, but not with fiction.

Parallel computing. It is possible to read a book and listen to radio or (kind of) watch television at the same time, but playing a video game or cooking is difficult while reading a book. If you like to multitask, here is a tip for you: audiobooks. Another option is to download an app to your phone or tablet and let it read aloud an ebook for you.

Bedtime page turner. For some readers, it may be impossible to sleep before reading a little while, at least.

I can think of many additional types of readers, such as people who take a book along to a beach or park, and people who listen to audiobooks when they drive or commute. The emergence of ebooks has made books as a medium a flexible part of our lives, allowing us to enjoy them in many ways and in many places.

Gutenberg’s printing press revolutionized book business just like ebooks are doing now

2016-05-30

Johannes Gutenberg was a German inventor who managed to put together multiple pieces of existing technologies in order to create something totally new. His invention was the printing press where he applied paper, ink, type and a human-operated press. He had invented a system that made it possible to copy books quickly and economically.

It happened more than 500 years ago, but considerable improvements to Gutenberg’s invention were made only when new types of printing mechanisms were invented in the 20th century. The introduction of computers and ebooks have revolutionized the business of printing once more. The possibility to use computers to create books with a global network to deliver them to readers across the world has once again made it possible to copy books more quickly and economically than ever before.

How did the original printing press work? Here is a video recorded at the Crandall Historical Printing Museum where an expert demonstrates how the Gutenberg-era printing press works:

The demonstration didn’t show what happened before ink was applied to the plate where the types were set. Wooden or metal types had been carved as mirror images of letters and numbers. Every letter on a page is represented by a type, and every type was set on a plate in reverse order.

For instance, take a look at the plate below that was carved for printing the Popeye cartoon onto a newspaper’s comics page. The plate is a mirror image of what appeared on the newspaper. The plate is made of iron, so someone had to carve the images and texts into the plate. Once the newspaper was printed, the unique plate that had required a lot of handwork could be thrown away.

That’s how we discovered the cartoon plate. Years ago, a printing house was handing out old printing plates to visitors at a book show. It was in Sweden – that’s why the text in the Popeye cartoon is Swedish (if you were wondering).

Fonts develop as reading shifts from paper to screen

2015-12-03

Many book readers, or readers of any kind of text, don’t give a second thought to the fonts that represent the visual image for each letter. Times Roman may have been the most popular font on printed matter, but is rarely seen on a computer, tablet or smartphone screen. There is a reason for it: the smaller the font size is, the simpler its design has to be to make it readable. The font can’t be so simple that letters look the same.

Typeface designer Tobias Frere-Jones recently released a new font titled Mallory specifically designed for small screens. In an interview to Digiday, he explained that the key factor that makes a font easily readable on a screen is to space the letters out, enlarge the interior of each lowercase, and simplify details.

Typographers have been aware of the solution for hundreds of years, so the technique itself is nothing new. What is new is that human kind is moving from reading texts on paper to reading text on screen. The font size is easy to change on the screen, allowing readers themselves to affect how the content looks like. Many ebook reading applications have a feature that let you even change the font of a book on the fly.

Here is a video where Frere-Jones talks about his font design: