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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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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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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yes, moving through 3d cluster of nodes (or keep scrolling through 1 long one if you want).
webseitz.fluxent.com/wiki/VirtualTh
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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.
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IMO The only one that seems to really grasp and solve this problem is liquidtext
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Still on a screen, but way less bad bc text is no longer only linear
Much worse, I think, because of the performance issues; see
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