Unusual Fuss Over Books

I’ve been very amazed by 3-star hotels in Korea in my past two trips there. The rooms were so beautiful and unique, they give me ideas on how I may want to design my own apartment if I ever do own one.

Rooms aside, I was looking for some easy-to-read Korean novels at Korean book stores during my free time in order to improve my language skills, I suddenly remembered the joy of purchasing books at bookstores. Since moving to Japan, I’ve been using Amazon so much, I hardly head to bookstores anymore and gradually forgot the joy I get admiring book covers.

I have this fetish fuss about book covers. I don’t like glossy covers, which seems to be the choice many American published books take. I love smooth matte finishes that several UK books use. If there’s two versions of the same book, I’d always make the extra effort to get the matte covers. Sometimes, I even forgo getting a book because of the cover. Silly, I know. But it only happens if the book isn’t one that I’m dying to read.

There’s also this thing about fonts and spacing that I am very particular about. No matter how much I want to read a book, if the font and spacing is bad, I will give it a pass. Books should always have ample border space and space between lines. The fonts shouldn’t be so small that it looks like a high school students’ printout, and it should be so big such that it looks like an elementary school kid’s bedtime story.

Interestingly, the problem that happens with English books doesn’t seem to happen with Japanese ones. The fonts are often decently standardized regardless of the publisher, making it easy for me to focus on content. Perhaps it’s because I don’t read as many Japanese books as English ones that I haven’t discovered any with poor layout. But one thing I cannot appreciate about many Japanese titles is that, they have the habit of using really really long names making it less neat. The titles are literally a sentence.

Anyhow, let me get back to admiring the book cover of the book I got in Korea.

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