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, I’m building this “book” around a literal maze
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