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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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on the whole newer physical books are so much worse than they used to be — smaller type, gutters so narrow you can’t see the full beginning of the line, final lines nearly running off the page, your fingers on the edge covers text, tight binding, cheap paper etc
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a good PDF would be infinitely preferable and that’s where i’ve been leaning a lot, lately yeah i want an overview mode and the ability to flip around that currently no tools support but i’m bearish on paper books bc publishers suck
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I'm excited for reading in VR myself. We could combine the best of physical books: object permanence, tangible visualization of position, etc. w/ nice parts of digital ones: easy copying, structural highlighting, search. Sadly, text legibility is not good enough right now...
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I think good tools for managing multiple windows can help w/ nonlinear reading. But it probably needs to be combined with quicker ways of encoding position, i.e open a new window of the book then quickly jumping to chapter X, then paragraph Y.
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Reading ebooks gives me general anxiety of being lost and trapped (but I still do it and buy hard copy or get a library copy to help if the book is really meaningful). But, I never feel lost reading the infinite scroll of Wikipedia articles even jumping around links like crazy.