I’m visiting Amsterdam and I saw this young lady on the ferry who was reading a small book. The young lady was stunningly beautiful but ferries being public transport and all I wasn’t about to chat her up. The tiny book continued to intrigue me though, so I mustered the courage to go talk to her. “This is about the business after all—not a pick up line,” I said to myself.

She turned out to be the nicest girl ever and explained to me this book format is called DWARSLEZER, which roughly translates to cross-reader. She even wrote it down for me—because let’s face it, Dutch is a pretty incomprehensible language for anyone non-Dutch.

It seems the first publisher to use this format is Jongbloed who called it the “dwarsligger” meaning “cross-beam” or “cross-bar”. Other publishers (AW Bruna Uitgevers, Dutch Media en Nieuw Amsterdam) have released books in this format and there might  be some legal action going on.

This format is a great idea because it halves the overall size of “the object you carry” or equivalently we can say it doubles the size of the page you read. Also the book she was reading was 500pp-long but no thicker than 1.5cm, so the “bible paper” helps to make the format compact.

Watch out for a dwarslezer edition of the No bullshit guide to math and physics coming soon!