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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

I find that digital books are simply too perfect. There should be pdf fonts where there are maybe 10 incantations of each character, and the display:

1. picks one incantation randomly for each display 2. slightly and randomly alters the position/rotation of each character 3. adds a tiny blotch now and then

Like the print in a real book, especially ones printed before 1970.

I also suggest that the background be an actual scanned image of a blank piece of paper. Those "paper color" backgrounds are too perfect. Take some blank pages out of an older book sometime and scan them, and you'll see what I mean.

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Most of the "book simulation" features I've seen (background textures, page turn animations, the like) have come across as gimmicky and useless, meanwhile digital books tend to still suffer from conceptually simple formatting problems like poor responsive text reflow or baking detailed vector figures into tiny JPEGs.

I'd settle for "too perfect" in a heartbeat.

I've sent many suggestions to the Kindle people of things they could improve on the Kindle, all of which were very simple to do. The years go by, they've done exactly 0 of them.

One of them, for example, was an option to eliminate the margin in a pdf display. The pdf already has a margin, so there's the pdf margin plus the margin the ereader puts around the pdf. This significantly reduces the number of pixels displaying information.

Making PDF display better doesn't make them any money.

More likely, there are multiple sev5 issues for it in the ticket system that nobody will ever get around to implementing.

i feel this, and i think i finally understand why people like vinyl static.

Yes. People wrongly argue that vinyl sounds are more accurate. CDs are more accurate. But CDs are perfect, and for us older folks, the sound of vinyl, with its scratches, pops, crackle, rumble, and crosstalk has a comfortable nostalgic appeal.

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