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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IMO The only one that seems to really grasp and solve this problem is liquidtext
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It's become almost a cliche: is literally *anyone* else doing anything real in this space? So impoverished!
How feasible is a ~20 e-reader-page device? Like— floppy eink pages. They take on the text of consecutive pages and you can read like a book. And maybe you can scroll that 20 page window through the book. Maybe some can be bookmarked and stay static.
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The unit cost is pretty intense, unfortunately. A Dynamicland-ish approach might be more viable. Amusingly, Bush's memex proposes a desktop with many acrylic screens on which pages you're reading would be projected
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Haha agreed! Maybe another useful line of thought is more on the "explorable explanations" thread; leaning more into the strengths of digital (eg computation) vs. fixing its deficiencies?
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Obv 's stuff, but also some newer stuff like this: zcliu.org/elasticdoc/ () or this: explorablemultiverse.github.io
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