Since I was a kid, I’ve been looking for the perfect way to read in bed. The ideal position would involve no sustained muscle effort, so I could just let my eyes drift shut as I read, without the book falling shut or my hand slipping or anything. One way is to sit up against something and hold the book on your lap, but that’s not great for falling asleep. So I usually end up reading on my side.
The problem is, you have to hold the book to see both pages, and in either case, you’re using some muscles to hold it where it is.
This has worked for most of my life, but it’s still not that ultimate relaxation.
However, I recently got a Kindle. I was intending to use it mainly as a mobile web browser, but I’ve surprised myself by using it to read an awful lot. And, with apologies to all the bibliophiles out there, I find the ergonomics better than a paperback. When snacking and reading, I can lay it flat on a table without the use of a book weight to hold it opened, and when lying in bed, I don’t have to keep moving it to read.
But it’s not perfect. There’s no way to hold it with a finger on the ‘next page’ buttons that doesn’t require a few muscles to hold it upright:
Either I work to hold my hand off the bed, or I awkwardly curl my fingers around it. Either way, it tips over if I relax my arm, even if it’s leaning against a pillow, and I’m startled awake by this:
I started to wonder if I could do even better. I got out of bed one night, went to the closet, and got a steel coat hanger and some pliers. After a few minutes of twisting, I created this:
First of all, it holds the Kindle upright …
And second, it lets me lie there motionless, and turn the pages with just a tiny twitch of my thumb:
Finally, after decades of reading in bed, I have reached that stage of perfect relaxation.
xkcd 
I find that stanza on the iPod Touch (or iPhone) is the perfect anywhere (including bed) reader. It allows you to lock the tilt of the book, so turning on its side doesn’t make it try to helpfully turn the book to stay level to ground. It’s light enough and small enough that I have no trouble holding it while keeping my hand on the “next page” screen area. Stanza also allows customization of which side of the screen acts as the “next page” button, so it can work no matter which side I lay on. It also has an easy switch to nighttime mode where the text and page colors are reversed and a slide to adjust brightness setting.
I couldn’t be happier with it.
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How do you read my mind?
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An excellent uh…coathanger and ebook hack. In fact, the best one yet! I have suffered the same book-positioning dilemma since childhood, my preferred is typically facedown, to rest the book on the bed. (Note: does not work well if you are male and reading an erotic novel)
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If you place a book on the floor, and lie face down on the bed with your head hanging over the edge (resting on your chin) you can read in bed quite easily.
You need your arm to tunr the page, but because it’s dangling off the bed it the minimum effort you can do.
It might be to late for you, but should you ever buy another hard-copy book you should try this technique.
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Too lazy to read any of the other posts, but you should definitely sell these. The lady that invented the crocs jewels made millions.
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Congratulations. You are now a god among mortals. I wish I could enjoy the heaven of relaxed in-bed reading like you. It must be like Heaven… -drool-
I just wish I didnt have to go broke in the process.
Captcha: Krewe op
Operation Krewe is a go!
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This is pure genius, I agree you should definitely sell this.
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Saw SixByNine’s comment (4 comments up), just as i was typing out the very same suggestion ! Lying on my stomach with the book on the floor is how i’ve read most of my books.
The second thing i wanted to comment about was auto-scroll …doesn’t the kindle have that ?
It’d be braindead if the kindle doesn’t …I read my ebooks on my palm with plucker http://www.plkr.org/ …which has auto-scroll …which once you get used to, you realize that the concept of pages in an electronic document is artificial and does not aid in any manner the reading of the document.
cheers,
– steve
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hey one can make a contraption to hold the paper book itself
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I just had to post when I saw the captcha WITH ERIS.
Hail Eris!
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hey, they shall sell those with the kindle. i’d pay for it!
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It seems just about every comic you write, I can connect with. Now, I visit the blog for the first time, kind of drowsy (and thinking about going to bed to read), when I read this. I’ve had this problem my whole life also, and damn it gets annoying trying to lie on my side (which is my strategy). I ordered a Kindle 2 yesterday, so this will probably be perfect for me. If I wasn’t a man (and not straight), I think now would be the time I would realise that I had found the perfect partner .
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I know that problem! I’m using my convertible tablet pc to read in bed. But this guy weights 2 kg. So I’m leaning it to the wall and I’m scrolling through the pages with my wireless mouse. But you need a lot of pillows an a few normal books to keep the Laptop in place.
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If you’re going to parody the Will Smith film in the blag name, shouldn’t it be “The Pursuit of Lazyness”?
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actually If I remember well you post a strip about sleeping at two in a bed with a girl by making a hole in it in the midle for the arms…
It s remain a solution involving less technology you can but the book instead of the two boxer game and read face down =) ..
ok it involve to ealy MAKE A HOLE IN A BED (which require muscles 😦 ) but after all you did use you muscles to twist the steel coat hanger .. ok even if it s considerably less..
BTW sorry for my english I m french 😦
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What an excellent solution!
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You’ve nailed why I like the Kindle: It lays flat, and is generally easier when it comes to holding it.
The problem I still have is when the layout gets more complicated than simple flowing paragraphs of text. Footnotes are awful – if you want to actually read them, you have to move a curosr line by line and then column by column to highlight the link, and then follow it to a later page in the book. Images sometimes get split in weird ways, even when they are small enough to fit on the screen at once.
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CNET posted this story! Nice solution for an annoying problem!
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Haha, those two pictures of you lying down and holding the book… I hate that! If I’m laying on the right side, I hate reading the pages on the right and vice versa. I’m so glad I’m not alone. By the way, is “Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers” any good? 🙂
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Hogfather!
Why has no-one mentioned Hogfather yet?
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Exif:
Software: Adobe Photoshop CS2 Macintosh
What’s this I see?
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I don’t own a Kindle, but do have an iPhone. The Kindle app for it is free, and has me totally hooked. I am an early tech adopter where I can be, but I just couldn’t make myself fork out the cash for a kindle that I didn’t want to carry around any more than a book. I want my book I’m reading to be in my hand any time I find myself standing on a line somewhere and I didn’t plan it. The iPhone solves that for me nicely.
The tie-in here, I love it for reading in bed mainly because it is a 1 handed device. You can hold it in your hand and still flip the pages with your thumb easily. Problem solved!
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holy shit, same exact problem…
I’ve always imagined making some sort of mechanical arm to hang from my ceiling that would hold the book directly over me and flip pages at the push of a button, but that is much more complex than this simple fix. I like the mechanism you used to push the button. genius!
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Two comments:
First: The book problem has plagued me for most of my life. Am now seriously considering a Kindle.
Second: ……….YOU ARE READING HOGFATHER AND ARE THEREFORE MY NEW FAVOURITE PERSON IN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE.
*regains control of brain* Sorry. Sir Terry Pratchett and any of his works tend to make me temporarily insane out of glee.
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Been there. I think mostly everyone has had this problem. Now that you mention it, the kindle does it’s part to fix that indeed. Bummer that it doesn’t do pdf (and isn’t out in germany). I think I might get a similar ebook reader.
As for your solution, clever, though I wonder if the angle you chose is ideal.
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Epic. My solution for my prs-505 was using the included case, worked really well for my situation. The downside/upside is I pass-out with the reader in bed from time to time. Thankfully it keeps my page!
Now if i could get a laptop setup in this position I could seriously start “working” 24/7.
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all that work at NASA really paid off, eh?
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i’ve always had to deal with the same annoying problem..now i want a reader of my own…and the hanger stand as well
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AWESOME. I love this.
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What do you do when you accidentally skip a page and need to go back?
If you do need to go back, then your relaxation is completely ruined as you need to move your arm around to the front to press the ‘prev page’ button.
You could say that you just never make that mistake. But if I were me (which I often am, except on Mondays), I’d be kept awake by knowing that if I do make that mistake I’d have to move my arm and I would probably end up putting too much focus on when I press the ‘next page’ button.
You have achieved greatness. Now exceed it.
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Awesome! Too bad the kindle is US only.
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Next time you’re feeling inventive, hack a bluetooth module into the Kindle so you can turn the pages with your phone instead.
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You put more effort into being lazy than anyone I’ve ever met.
Cheers.
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That’s always bothered me when I read. I applaud you, man. But wouldn’t the screen be too bright and beam on your eyes. Also, what if the battery dies?
Also, there is no such thing as too much effort into being lazy.
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Hogfather indeed! It’s a great passage in the book, too. Terry P is such a wonderful observer of human nature.
This gives me some sort of wierd guilty sense of double validation for both my obsessive consumption of Pratchett novels and the stalkerish glee with which I wait for the tri-weekly updates of XKCD. (“that Monroe must be a right-thinking kind of man, he reads Pratchett” / “That nice XKCD bloke reads Terry Pratchett, perhaps its not unusual to have read each of his novels at least 10 times.”)
Of course, I am my own man, and don’t need approval for my tastes and preferences. But still….
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I simply hire Stephen Fry to read to me in bed, so I can drift off to the relaxing sound of his Baileys-smooth tones.
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When this comes to xkcd store?!
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marry me!
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Does the Kindle turn itself off when you fall asleep?
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Oh my god I, too, have read Pratchett’s books multiple times. And the Hogfather happens to be the one I’ve reread the most.
❤ Finding kindred spirits in random places..
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XKCD: “My dad says that flu vaccines are linked to autism. So to be safe from swine flu I’m trying to lick an autistic kid.”
The News: “New cases are being probed at PS 177, a school for autistic children in Queens, and at Ascension, a parochial school in Manhattan, Freiden said. PS 177 has been closed and authorities are deciding whether to close the Manhattan school.”
So much for that theory!
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Funny coincidence, a couple of nights back, I decided to do something about this problem too.
I have a bunch of these tiny cylindrical neodymium magnets that I bought on amazon. A couple on the title page, a couple on the page I’m reading and voila, I’m good for a couple of pages. I guess a simple binder clip would work too.
When I can afford a Kindle, I’ll go bend a hanger too. Thanks for the idea!
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Genius. I may have to buy a kindle now, because of that.
Or at least, build one to hold my laptop, as I have a convertable tablet PC. Portrait-mode web browsing in bed! Epic.
GottaLoveMagnets: I dunno man, you still got to do some considerable movements to change pages, and I’m not sure I like the safety implications of dozing off while having a couple of those suckers near my fingers and other vulnerable body parts.
Captcha: Magnus Thud. A pratchett-type troll that transforms into a fire truck?
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I prefer to lie on my back with the kindle resting proped up on my chest. It requires little effort to hold up with my hand and my thumbs rest nicely near the page buttons. When I fall asleep, my hands have enough control that the kindle falls over very slowly onto my stomache.
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What if you got some eBook software for a computer and hooked it up to a projector pointed at the wall/ceiling. You’d porbably be able to fashion a wireless presentation remote to control the page turning, and the projector/computer could go to sleep after a period of inactivity.
Obviously, this uses more power than a Kindle or snail book, but with the two alternatives, you have a light source that stays on while you’re asleep.
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You should sell that and market it as the Kindle Kradle!
If you are too lazy to mass-produce it yourself, I bet Amazon would be willing to buy the rights.
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I slept on the bottom bunk and had the book held up with a coathanger apparatus stuck between the slats of the bed….. still had to turn the pages though…. I guess I need to get a kindle then.
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I’m revising for my exams currently and I designed something similar – The Learning Hat 5,000!
http://the-biomatrix.blogspot.com/2009/04/biomatrix-tv-and-learning-hat-5000.html
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