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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I have a thread riffing on various ways digital reading could be improved:
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#ThingsIwantToExist: better ebook readers. Hell, a better app for reading digital text altogether—when I shift from "ebook reader" to "interactive reading" I find myself thinking current best thing might almost be "paste into gdocs" and that's nuts.
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That thread 👆 is mostly about software but I think if I had some millions in seed capital and more free time I could design & manufacture & sell a device that'd afford a bunch of cool workflows that kindle/kobo don't.
(not as confident about costs/sales as with a software co)
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Not sure about business model for that either. Probably would want to aim to have the hardware be profitable on its own, maybe starting with lux (tesla-strategy) but could also do some cool book-licensing stuff or something, idk.
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On reflection... honestly I think I'd partner w/ .
Which then might sorta-kinda require a different license to the books, if they're going to be fully interlinkable. I guess that could just be its own software/content product 🤔
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It would be nice to be able to "layer on" dynamic medium support, without coupling.
Yes, definitely with you. The main part I don't understand how to manage is licensing for books or journal articles that aren't free.
In an ideal world, we'd have some sort of patreon economy where authors would get supported via <..details..> & their works could be open, but...
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Because basically no book publisher wants their property to be platform-agnostically remixable.
But maybe somehow we'll go through a Napster→iTunes transition that will force some other business model to emerge... then a more YouTube-like phase. Or something.
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Btw I love the layers of your thing and how they appear overlaid, but I don't know how to pop one off the top of the stack.
Not seeing an x button and the esc key doesn't do anything.