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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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.https://twitter.com/schlagetown/status/1211711797864083456 …
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I think this is key. The heart of what I dislike in blogs is that they tend to be low context. An important facet of books is common naming of certain terms, which provides common tools for thought and sets readers up for deeper logical arguments. Where's the blogosphere canon?
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A metaphor is how senior devs and architects can use localized language to precisely express broad thoughts about the software, but junior devs need to "onboard". Books contain their own onboarding. This matters a lot.
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books as decor