Conversation

Is it just me or are we experiencing a slightly exhausting glut of people reading and summarizing huge volumes of books? Kinda like professional readers... reading for the sake of reading rather than as a side effect of figuring something out for themselves.
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Yeah definitely feel like an asshole posting this thread especially since I drafted off the benefits of writing about books back when there were far fewer people doing it and they had way more cachet than they do today.
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In 2009 nobody ever said of a book, “this should be a thread at best”. Even the fluffiest faddish business book was given benefit of doubt of having a decent essay’s worth of content to it. Books meant something beyond just being an intellectual calling card for “thought leaders”
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I think the book as a mainstream medium is possibly dead. Now new books are of the following types: 1. Personal brand calling card 2. Scholarly specialist things 3. B2B middleware for movies/TV, incidentally also read by nerds 4. Reactionary memberberries for waldenponders
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I think all the paper-book supremacists gloating at the plateauing of ebooks are misreading what’s happened. It’s not that p-books are fighting back, it’s that blogs etc are undermining both now. The p-book resurgence is a transient domestic cozy reactionary thing. Doomed.
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Books need reinvention but I don’t think hypertext and stuff are relevant. Those are entirely different media. The post internet book will still be a serialized, ludic-immersive thing whose USP is making all the sequencing choices for the reader.
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A lot more is possible within this definition than we think though. I’ll add: possibly the “book” will always have a specialized form factor and never quite be reducible to an app within a generic compute device. I prefer my e-ink kindle to the app or reading pdfs.
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I was asking about radio pre/post-TV (got no response) mainly to analogize to books
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Is there a good read about the differences between radio cultures before and after disruption by TV? Feel like we need a similar evolution in books pre/post social media.
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Yeah stuff like this, while still respecting basic form: serialized and ludic immersion. It’s a book if you don’t ask the reader to ever choose their own adventure (that gimmick never really worked)
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Replying to @vgr
It would be cool if books expanded or contracted with the reader’s domain knowledge
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Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer in Diamond Age remains a pretty decent vision. A single sequenced journey. It can adapt and morph to the reader’s progress, but not branch in open-ended ways.
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Wonder if common-grounding is an essential feature of books. Should we expect those who’ve “read” a book in the future to share a certain common context? Even under customization/personalization? I think so. “Many roads to the top of a mountain, but the view is always the same.”
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I think I’ve convinced myself “hypertext book” is an ill-posed concept. Contradiction in terms. Successful hypertext is accessed in ways that drives self-directed divergence. Forcing author-directed convergence will either fail or not be hypertext.
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The dictionary or encyclopedia is a poor-fit marginal use of the book format but the canonical textual experience in hypertext. That says something. Notable that hypertext has eaten all dictionaries and encyclopedias but largely failed to touch long (> short story) fiction.
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Personal experience: not counting my blog/newsletter compilation ebooks, my first real book Tempo was composed directly in LaTeX out of a rich stream-of-consciousness fugue outline on a 5-hour flight, filling out a paper notebook. I *never* blog that way.
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The book I’m trying to write now, recently potted into Roam, is really fighting me. It wants to be an encyclopedia, not a serialized ludic narrative. We’ll see what comes out the other end of the Epic Struggle.
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A few video games seem more like books to me now than nominal books tortured out of online content. Serialized? Check Ludic-immersive? Check Common-grounding of finishers? Check Good recent example: Monument Valley. Or the Room trilogy. These are book-games.
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A few classic books, if written today, would have been written as blogs. Like Les Miserables with its digressions from the main Jean Valjean — Javert story. I read an abridged edition as a teenager that left out all the side blog posts within the book. Never read the full thing.
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Trying to define “future book” in a way that I actually want to write it. Something deeply depressing about the idea of writing a traditional book in 2020. It anti-excites me. Also seems more honest since my reading of books has also changed. I now “read” more like a shredder.
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Yep, this is the limitation of one-size-fits-all summaries/reviews, and reason I stopped doing them. The largest part of context is the reader and where they're trying to go. Unless that interests you or coincides with you/your direction, limited value.
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Replying to @vgr
I think we need fewer reviews / analyses; more contextualization. Following the idea of the antilibrary: antireading; antireviews. Many interesting books defy summarization, or at least demand something more; writing & reading about them can be rewarding if approached obliquely.
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