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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29795
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Bookmarks.

It's very easy with a book to keep track of where you are, and even if you forget what has happened in the story, we have an amazing ability to skim back and recover and get on with the story. This makes it a cinch with a book to start and stop as we please and split a very long story up into whatever sized chunks fit our life.

You would never want to watch an episode of television partway through, and then try to watch the rest of the episode later. I've done it a few times out of necessity. Sometimes I'll restart the entire episode. Rewinding and fastforwarding through to catch my bearings isn't fun, and sometimes whatever I am watching it on doesn't even remember where I left off.

The episode format implies that you are consuming that episode in a single session, and the book media really has no such constraints. Episodes can work in a book just fine (as those collected short stories or linked stories novels support), but the format is more likely to attract authors who want to tell the larger stories that books support SO MUCH BETTER than other media can.

Charles de Lint is my favorite author though who writes often in this mode.

Original score: 1