Conversation

Table of contents | Meaningness

* Neural Networks and Deep Learning: neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com * How to Design Programs (2nd ed): htdp.org * Circles, Sines, and Signals: jackschaedler.github.io/circles-sines- * Meaningless (is it a book?!):

meaningness.com

Better ways of thinking, feeling, and acting—around problems of meaning and meaninglessness; self and society; ethics, purpose, and value.

Then there's the class of "web serializations"—books which started as a series of blog posts, or online fan fiction chapters, which were later serialized into "real" books. Those often lose something in book form, since they weren't "designed in one piece," lack a coherent whole.

Why aren't there more? Well, if you *want* to write a web-first book—again, not even a fancy new-media thing, just a book whose text is online—there's no quick consumer-grade solution. Spin up Ghost and write some HTML, I guess. Or elaborately theme a Wordpress?

Reading texts on computers is unpleasant

Then there's the monetization problem. Lots of people have web sites which vend a PDF, but that's different. More fundamentally, maybe one barrier is just that reading long-form texts—especially book-length texts—on screens is pretty miserable!

notes.andymatuschak.org

I thought about this a lot whilst working as a bookseller and teaching myself webdev. I kept coming up with ideas, only to realise they'd been done in one form or another. ✅ Hyperlink CYOA ✅ Video cut screens ✅ Dynamic backgrounds Etc etc...

...and the problem with trying to define a "web book" beyond saying "a book readable on the internet" is that you inevitably exclude a bunch of potential techniques by omission. Depends on the story, and the audience.

Replying to

11:22 PM · Apr 5, 2020TweetDeck

Definitely. I’m very open in what I’d consider in this bucket! Just: a long-form, primarily textual mass medium you engage with via a web browser. Any good examples for you in that broader sphere?

Replying to

Beyond the diary format? (Pepys, Frank, Weir etc) Not that I can think of, to be honest. Maybe the xkcd What If? series, but that's a string of articles akin to a diary. Maybe the limitations of the display (and inbuilt distractions) limit our tolerance to snippets?