I was just thinking about this and came to the conclusion that A hundred years of solitude and a clockwork orange would be two books that should be consumed in their physical format, rather than on Kindle.
In a hundred years of solitude nearly every person from the Buendía Family is either called “Aureliano” or “José Arcadio” which is why I often found myself going back and forth reading the detailed family tree in the back of the book to know which generation the characters belonged to. Similarly, when reading A clockwork orange, I kept referring to the nasdat language dictionary in order to find the regular meaninv of a word. In both of these cases I think reading on a Kindle would be so inconvenient, as you keep losing your place/flow in the book.
Do you have other examples of this?
by Hot-Customer1845
15 Comments
Art books and other books that are about high quality images.
House of Leaves definitely would not work as well on a kindle.
Books with extensive annotation. This kind of drives me nuts. I almost exclusively read via ereader but I like to read classical books with heavy annotation so I can understand what the hell is going on but the options for that in ebooks are awful.
Pop up books.
I think the kindle TOC is pretty handy for navigating to glossaries and reverting back to where you were reading, tbh
**Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell**. I keep losing my spot whenever I click on the footnotes. It’s much easier reading the physical books with the footnotes right on the bottom of the pages.
Illuminae files by Kristoff and someone else should be read on paper. It plays with the pages in so many ways with the different communications, etc. It would look terrible in a paperwhite.
i read almost exclusively on my kindle. i appreciate it most with more complex books. i often use the ‘search’ feature to, for example, look for a character’s earlier appearances when i feel like i’m missing something.
Any of the graphic novels, like Maus and Persepolis would best be enjoyed on a physical copy.
What books do you think are not meant to be read on kindle?
Mainly pop up books ….
Classic books.
History books.
Definitely books that incorporate visual media, be it a comic (hate the quality of manga on kindle), photography or simply art.
Any High Fantasy book that you need the map, unless you have a copy of the map
I really enjoy Ryan North’s How to Invent Everything and How to Take Over the World but they are extremely not something you should read on a Kindle or listen to on Audible. I’m actually kind of surprised both formats exist. My preferred method of reading is buying both versions of a book and using WhisperSync to keep them lined up so I can listen when I’m in the car and read when I’m at home.
The Kindle version is bad, but the Audible version is hilarious. The book has many charts and tables of data in the book which the author just reads. It’s so strange.
Infinite Jest. It absolutely is required to easily access the footnotes.