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.

My experience is a little bit like your's except that I am rarely able to quote from the text. (My memory isn't like that.) And it does mean that re-reading is often rewarding. But I do tend to remember things by "where" they are in the book - not by page number - which means that it's really hard to find things in the Kindle.

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

If the page numbers you're looking at actually say "Page 241" rather than "Location 2348," then they do indeed correspond to a print version, at least for books actually purchased in the store. (Some of the ones I've converted seem to have made-up page numbers for some reason) Apparently, you can see the ISBN of the edition the page numbers are designed to match in the e-book's description.

I don't think it's absolutely perfect; it may be a mathematical estimate, where it basically says "the print edition has 536 pages and they're 50% of the way through, so they must be on page 268" when really you would be on 267 or 269, but it's definitely a close estimate.

I actually prefer the locations and the description, too, unless I'm trying to match it to a printed edition.

I saw a favorable review of a new-ish collection of short stories by Maureen McHugh (she wrote China Mountain Zhang). It's called After the Apocalypse (that word gets used a lot here, doesn't it?).

I read by chunks, paragraphs at a time, and then I have to skim back sometimes if I've managed to miss something important. I read really fast and have good comprehension, though, in general.

And I do miss the tactile thing of paper books where I kinda gauge the denouement by how thick the bit in my right hand is. Which is a problem for things like Pratchett where they give a sample of the next book at the end of the current book. But obvs, that's something I can't do on the Nook at all.

What I wish is that they used the graphic of the cover of the book I'm currently reading as the screensaver. That would bring me back to it more quickly than the way I use it now.