One big roadblock for environments hoping to improve on the book with fancy interactive elements: they all require reading on a screen! And reading on a screen is almost universally terrible!
I've been getting increasingly worried about this—seems like a serious threat! (con't)
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For instance, expert readers generally read non-linearly, but object permanence issues really inhibit that on screens. (notes.andymatuschak.org/Maintaining_mu, notes.andymatuschak.org/Continuous-scr)
In many cases (eg. on e-readers) *performance* issues inhibit expert reading! Wild! (notes.andymatuschak.org/Poor_performan)
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Of course there are on-screen features which enhance expert reading… but on balance, I'm pretty reliably a worse reader when reading on screens.
Not thrilled about needing to solve those problems in addition to all the tools-for-thought ones! What do you find promising here?
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The word lookup feature on a kindle is hugely useful as an extension of the the reading experience for an “expert reader”. (Not all minuses)
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I was thinking about this recently, the Kindle started so well, but has seen almost no improvement for many years. Why are there no apps for Kindle? Even a proper Instapaper app (that automatically syncs, syncs your highlights back, etc) would have been a big upgrade.
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I briefly tried a friend's Remarkable e-ink tablet and it was actually pretty great.
It made me wonder - what kind of UX could you design around the constraint of a small delay?
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this might interest you, Andy's notes below(in the next tweet) make a lot of sense.
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Need to read about this, ereaders and screens feel to me superior experiences to paper in terms of speed of reading
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A way I describe it is when reading in a good medium you become immersed in the content (everything else disappears). A paper book is worse at this: I. Have to do more work to turn pages, and it's slower, and I can stick an iPad to my face and read something with even light
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