Cecilia, hats off to you and your son! We had friends in CA who started homeschooling due to the violence in schools. This was back in the 80s when there weren't very many resources for homeschooling parents and they had very little support. Their kids thrived. Now I know many who homeschool and our parish has a homeschool co-op and it's been beautiful to see how well the kids are growing both in academics, not just in the humanities either, and in virtue. It brings to mind the truth that parents are really and truly the first educators and they need to remain so. Even when a child is in school, the parents need to be involved. I was always grateful that for us (even in my childhood), school was an extension of the home with the same values.

Yeah, it depends what you want to do with them. If you're mostly reading at home, that's one scenario. If you're moving around a lot and want a book or books with you, then that's a very different situation.

As someone who owns over 8,000 books, I can tell you that 6 X 9 was around long before self publishing.

I stopped buying paperbacks around the time the 6x9 Trad paperback started to become standard here. I hated them. They were too big and too heavy.

I've replaced all of the ones I did get with eBooks now. I still have them in my shelves though.

One of my favorite movies. The novelization was particularly good imo and I used to read it along with the movie. It really made the villain's story so much better and filled in a lot of backstory for Lindsey and Bud.

What an interesting and wide-ranging discussion this has turned into. Sorry to be jumping in when it's progressed so far already. I just wanted to say something about home-schooling/hone education. I'm always interested to hear people's experience of it. I had to take one of my sons out of school when he was about 12 because he became so anxious about going that it was more or less a phobia, although in fact he didn't see it as a phobia but as a reasonable reaction to an impossible situation. The school authorities were unable to offer any solution so we were on our own.
Anyway, once we got past these initial stages of panic and disbelief, we just got on with it. I am not sure how feasible it would have been if he had been interested in science or engineering or anything practical, but he had always been a voracious reader (and still is) and interested in a kind of philosophical approach to things, i.e. he thinks a lot!. We took part in some group events, including a holiday, with a home education organisation, we wrote plays together for a youth drama group and he also acted in them, and in his later teens he took some exams at a local college. He was writing all the time too. He then went to university and graduated with 1st class honours in English, published a book, won some short film competitions with a group of friends, and now works in communications.
Although I happened to be a qualified history teacher, in this role I was more of a facilitator, searching out places we could visit, books to use, etc. He had to teach himself for a lot of the time as I was the sole earner in the family for some years and had to go to work. He is still quite an anxious person in certain situations but he has good friends and gets on well at work.
In some cases I suggested books for him to read (at last she gets to the point!) and in others he found them himself. I remember him doing a project on the works of Orwell for one of his exams, for instance, though generally he liked fantasy and grew up waiting for the next Harry Potter book. He and some friends run a book club now and I'm always surprised by their random choices of reading.