Yeah, I never realized how much I rely on peeking ahead to see where the chapter ends until I used the Kindle. That's just one of many reasons why I don't want one, but it was a bigger one than I would have thought.

Kindles don't have page numbers? Nooks do, but they're weird. I'm not sure what they align with. The printed book, maybe? Because when you change the font size, your page number doesn't change.

I did use the dictionary for the first time this Christmas (orrery? WTF?), and that was really nifty, especially since I didn't have an internet connection. I also used it on the same day to look something up for my sister that wasn't in the book. Which reminded me, I should load up a dictionary or two on my mobile devices. Silly oversight.

Kindles tell you what percentage of the book you've read.

I'm actually liking not having page numbers, and the lack of easy skippability. I hate it when I flip forward to peek, and I'm not doing it at all on the Kindle.

Kindles tell you what percentage of the book you've read.

Yeah, I hate that. Especially when I am reading one novel in a collection (like the complete works of an author). It seems to stay on whatever percentage you are on of that book forever.

I like percentages. Since the Nook pages don't flip with when you move ahead in the book every time, that's pretty much the arithmetic I'm doing any time. And that's how I look at a normal book's progress too, by proportion.

Which means I'm disproportionately irritated by indices (Hundred Thousand Kingdoms totally didn't need one) and "bonus" material (sycophantic interviews) if it sets my count off.

Not precisely the point, but for some reason it distracts me.

Wow- from the comments on that article, I gather skipping is rather reviled. I had no idea.

Does anyone else feel they read by sort of taking a snapshot of the age, and somehow digesting what is on it, rather then following along with each word like you were reading aloud. I think sometimes I digest more than others, in addition to skipping.

Also, I skip a lot less in YA novels, possibly because I can read them in one sitting and, barring Harry Potter, the good ones have less going on for pages and pages about trees or something.

My Kindle gives page numbers (and percentages, etc), but they're Kindle pages and don't necessarily correspond to any print version.

I've been skimming and wanting to jump into the Bulgakov (Master and Margarita) discussion and the Virginia Woolf discussion and get back to my promised comments on Jemisin, and a whole bunch of other things. My brain is all sloshy right now with a current project, but I'm hoping it will get better - thank you guys for being here and talking about these things. I love this thread.

Sophia, what got me typing was wanting to answer your question, and the fact that I read it before my time-window for internet skimming closed. I don't take snapshots, but I read fast and often don't realize I'm turning pages. Reading on my iPad makes this experience even more slippery. It's actually tough for me to talk about how I read because it sounds so strange and weird and woo - the story, if it's a good one*, just starts to happen around me, and the pages disappear. When I'm finished, I can quote from the text and seem to have most of the story in my head. (*some stories, my eyes just slide right the hell off, and I can't finish them at ALL. And some I feel the urge to take a red pen to instead of reading.)

Does anyone else read like that?

After finishing the article Hec linked about skipping, I wandered through the Guardian's marginalia and ended up at the story of Tolkien's 1961 Nobel nomination. Nominated by CS Lewis, rejected because his prose, in the words of one committee member, "has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality."

That same year they also rejected Robert Frost and EM Forster on account of they were too old, and Lawrence Durrell for being too erotically fixated. Graham Greene was the runner-up, Karen Blixen the second runner-up, and the winner was Yugoslavian writer Ivo Andrić.