@andy_matuschak with @eriktorenberg on tools for thinking, and especially the future of books!https://www.spreaker.com/user/10197011/designing-and-developing-new-tools-for-t …
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Ted Nelson published Computer Lib / Dream Machines in 1974. I read it that year. It’s the incredible vision that specifically inspired the web—and it was about *books*. Half a century later, Andy & I are approximately the only people in the world who write hypertext books.pic.twitter.com/oAgnEZvuRO
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Nobody even recognizes what a hypertext book is. http://Meaningness.com says “this is a book” on every page, yet nearly everyone refers to it as a blog. “Blog”—a collection of essays structured only by publication date—is the only recognized form of self-published web site.
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“You should publish this as an eBook". Duuude, what for? You're reading it on a screen now, and the experience is far richer than a bad electronic imitation of a dead tree. And still so much more is possible than the half-baked affordances I worked intohttp://meaningness.com
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Replying to @Meaningness @andy_matuschak
I want to agree, don't you think we ought to to look at the repeated comments "you should make this an ebook" as a sign that people want something out of a reading experience that hypertext books still do not deliver?
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What regular texts lack in interconnectivity they more than make up for in narrative coherence. they are much easier to read and retain. Even with meaningness, which is excellent, the bulk of the reader value is contained in the big essays which have coherent plotlines
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Yeah, when I started taking meaningness seriously, in 2016, I apparently was like "I really need a way to track what I'm reading here" and made an "Article Reading" spreadsheet. Eventually gave that up and just read the whole thing in ToC order.pic.twitter.com/HmmBFlZtmm
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Exactly... I also read the whole thing in order and that's why I retainers so much of it. Arguments have preludes and preconditions they need to be coherent, they have structure, and the whole idea of hypertext books is basically to destroy that structure
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It's not to destroy that structure, but to allow for other structures *as well*. The problem is, people get spooked and don't have a workflow for those other structures and feel like they need to do something clever instead.
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Yes I’d like to have affordances for multiple *recommended* nav paths, in addition to allowing free movement. The Design Unbound thing is a first cut at that, but much more should be possible
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I frequently do this with just inline text, like “you should read that other page first unless x” or “you can skip the next bit if you don’t care about y”
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Mmm, you might appreciate this braindump of mine on the question of "what is prose?" It notes that there are lots of muddling-through sorts of ways that people insert nonlinearity into otherwise linear prose. Of which this is one.https://roamresearch.com/#/app/malcolmocean/page/fDzXwsNW3 …
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