remarkable details

June 2, 2024 11:18 AM

nearing the end of Iris Moon's lovely book Melancholy Wedgewood, i happened to check out the google books site (to share a link). a surprise there was that the pages are different. the words are the same, but the actual pages of the printed book i hold are a different color: wedgewood blue (of course 😄). this has me thinking; what other books like this? i hope you'll share any ideas/experience. are there books you know where details differ, especially remarkably so, between digital & print editions?

a video i think relates How to Make a Book with Steidl

posted by HearHere to Media & Arts (5 answers total)

A few years ago when storage was more expensive and processors were slower, document imaging systems scanned text to 1-bit black and white for efficiency. I don't know much about Google's scanning pipeline, but I imagine they were scanning to 8-bit grayscale at most, again to save size and make processing more efficient. So I think this is less "an aesthetic choice" and more "document imaging." You'll probably have better luck looking for books with unique printing/binding than specifically books handled differently on Google Books.
posted by Alterscape at 11:53 AM on June 2 [1 favorite]

There are a lot of editions of The Neverending Story, which is about a kid sitting in the real world reading a book that takes place in another world. The text specifies that the book is printed in two colors, so in many editions the real-world parts are in one ink color and the book-world parts are in another color (combinations vary; I've seen red and green and red and blue). In editions where multiple colors aren't possible (like for eink, but also in some cheap paperback editions), I've seen different fonts used. But sometimes an ebook copy won't be well-formatted, or the software used to read it won't support the two different formatting styles, and so that whole aspect will be missing.
posted by trig at 12:21 PM on June 2 [3 favorites]

Response by poster: looking for books with unique printing/binding
Alterscape, thank you for the better wording. Moon's book, in particular, was published in 2023. in this instance, the publisher seems to have thought that the different mediums required different contrasts, i.e. it might be harder to read blue & black together on a screen. yes though: i should specify that differences resulting from computation, missing pages, and the like are of less interest (though always happy to hear!) more things like the Waldseemüller Map
posted by HearHere at 12:35 PM on June 2

Like The Neverending Story, Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves was published in multiple editions, with text that is printed in different colors or grayscale in different editions. I'm not sure what the ebook looks like.
posted by dizziest at 11:02 AM on June 3 [1 favorite]

Dictionary of the Khazars has 'male' and 'female' editions.
posted by Bourbonesque at 3:35 PM on June 6 [1 favorite]