How many books an you read that could never have an eBook edition? Over at The Millions, author Garth Risk Hallberg offered seven ways to “Kindle-proof” your manuscript.
Some of the simpler ways include using color, adding illustrations, and playing with typeface. Ten titles that Hallberg lists which employ these methods include The Original of Laura by Vladimir Nabokov and Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak.
The fourth step recommends that you “run with scissors.” Here’s more from Hallberg’s piece: “The opening story of John Barth‘s Lost in the Funhouse, famously invites readers to take scissors to it and create a Mobius strip. This cut-up aesthetic is more literal in Jonathan Safran Foer‘s Tree of Codes, which slices and dices the pages of Bruno Schulz‘s Street of Crocodiles to create pages like lace. It’s a piece of found prose-poetry whose sentences change as you turn the page. Except on the Kindle, where it doesn’t – and couldn’t – exist.”