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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Oh, fascinating. I usually use the page down/page up keys when reading long text on my computer. Often when scanning back I'll count how many times I hit page-up, 6 or 12 or whatever, so I can page-down the same number of times. cc (who QT'd your thread)
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Another trick I use is to commit to memory a seemingly unique word sequence where I'm reading, then Ctrl-F it to restore my place.
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Re: maintaining multiple positions when e-reading: while still far from fingers-tier, current Kobos have improved the situation a bit. The black dots represent dog-eared pages, enabling faster transitions between multiple locations; the bold text points to the previous position.
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MoonReader keeps the ToC and your "bookmarks" (highlights) a click away, making it easy to jump to one.
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And fiction can also benefit from non-linearity!
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I have the (dim) hope that a small “spiral bound” set of screens - maybe even just 4 screens double sided - could, with the right affordances, rekindle the object permanence-ness.
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(These links aren’t working for me, btw—seems like the whole site doesn’t load for me? Says an unexpected error has occurred)
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Hm, maybe some momentary downtime? It's up for me at the moment. If it's still down for you, could you tell me what your device/browser are?
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Just curious if you have ever tried liquidtext. A different form of interaction that lets you pull apart the text you are reading to make notes. Also a unique compression from pinched fingers to pull concepts in the text together.
It’s an app on iOS from a research project.
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Yes, I think it's one of the only interesting projects in this space.
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