The Flipback

[Will]

I remember reading about these a while ago. They're a smaller format book, with the text/spine horizontally equal, so you hold it 'side-on' and turn the page from the bottom upward and over. It's an interesting evolution for the printed/dead-tree format book, and one that's evolved based on digital technology such as eReaders/iPhones and such.

More info here: Flipbacks

 

[beer good]

I'm still waiting for someone to explain to me how this is anything but just a paperback printed the wrong way around. What's the point?

 

[Will]

It's just an alternate, fixed format for books, possibly one that may be adopted more widely going forward. For metropolitans it might be that it's more convenient on the crowded tubes/buses/trams as they can hold and turn pages one handed more easily.

There's an article from The Guardian here that sums it up with a little more information.

 

[Will]

This got me thinking to books in Japan from when I visited last year, and checking out the bookshops there. There it seems the format for books is much more common and identical - smaller format, but all of the books were identical vs. varying sizes of Western paperbacks - obviously still the coffee table/art books, but for fiction much more standardized. So much so that it's not uncommon for longer books to be spread across two or three different books - far more practical as anyone who has read War & Peace, or Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell might be willing to attest. I almost sprained my wrist reading the latter on the train to work...

I must ask my wife about that one, as it may be that was just my impression on first take, but I do know several books she has read in Japanese have been across two separate volumes, including Murakami's 1Q84 and even Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Also Graham Swift's Waterland was across two books if I recall correctly... Japanese kanji/hiragana/katakana may have something to do with it also, maybe taking up more space, but possibly I'd have thought that the kanji being mostly ideograms take up much less space than the Western alphabet.

 

[beer good]

1Q84 is a bit of a special case though, as it's deliberately written in three volumes.

I commute every day, and I can honestly say I've never felt the need to read a book the other way around. But hey, if it works for some people, I don't mind as long as they keep publishing normal ones as well... I just don't see how the book can be smaller than the right-way-up version. Unless they're abridged or the font is really tiny, surely X,000 words take up as much space vertically as horizontally? And the big question, doesn't this feel a bit like aping the e-reader and giving up some of the advantages of the paper book, without actually encorporating the biggest advantages of the e-reader?

 

[Will]

Having been squished on the tube in London many a time I've had the problem where I couldn't turn a page, or turn a page easily plenty of times. More often I couldn't read at all, so I do see the benefits of this clearly. But I also think it's just giving a shot to a new format that has proved successful in other countries across Europe when it was released there. More options for readers can't be bad, right? Reading another article though I do see that the paper is super thin (bible paper one article referred to it as) so that might also detract from the pleasure for some people! That may answer some of your question as regarding how the space is adjusted.

Another article on it here

I must admit I am v. curious about these books. I was thinking to buy a book in the format to check it out. Not like I have book buying issues already, without this new format come along to help deplete my bank balance...

 

[SharonT]

I liked the idea of these little books as a stocking stuffer. Are they available in the US at the present time?