5 ms·

> What's the successor to the book? And how could books be improved? > Books are great (unless you're Socrates). We now have magic ink. As an artifact for effe

by panic 8y ago

> What's the successor to the book? And how could books be improved? > Books are great (unless you're Socrates). We now have magic ink. As an artifact for effecting the transmission of knowledge (rather than a source of entertainment), how can the book be improved? How can we help authors understand how well their work is doing in practice? (Which parts are readers confused by or stumbling over or skipping?) How can we follow shared annotations by the people we admire? Being limited in our years on the earth, how can we incentivize brevity? Is there any way to facilitate user-suggested improvements? The great thing about books is that no matter how long they've been sitting around, it's easy to take one off the shelf and read it. The cultural infrastructure of written language has been around much longer (and been much more stable) than the computational infrastructure you'd need have your "magic ink" still work in 1000 years. At some point we need to start treating computers and software more seriously if we want to have things like this.

ramijames 8y ago
I love books, don't get me wrong, but they do age. This is especially true of books that are specialty related. Take a book from the 70s on computers, on medicine or psychology, on prehistory, on history, etc. They are all likely to be significantly outdated compared to their modern counterparts. There is much to be said for the modern way of information transference: it is always most up to date.
- tsmarsh 8y ago
  Whilst your core point about books aging is absolutely true I think thats mostly the mass market publications designed to ease entry than actual papers. Similarly, anything writen about an implementation is short lived. The Idiots Guide to Windows 98 is less useful today than it was in 1998 and is getting less useful with time. Lovelace, Babbage, Turing, McCarthy et al are still seminal. But these are academic papers that focus on what is possible to compute and how one might construct an implementation. There are some interesting edge cases too. Is the Gang of Four Design Patterns still relevent? Its not embarassing, but its not as applicable as it used to be.
  - throwawaybbqed 8y ago
    As an aside, what would be today's ideal intro to design patterns? Now .. on topic ... I had a roomful of books collected from my youth. I cleaned out my room at my parents house some years ago ... and pretty much everything got chucked. The only books that I kept were seminal books like Knuth, Cormen, Gang of Four, TCP/IP series (v6 kinda makes them out-of-date too). All my MFC books ... java books .. pretty much all of it was out of date. I had an epiphany .. CS does not age well at all. I no longer buy physical books ... I got a subscription to Safari and love it. Also consume tons of content on e-learning platforms. But .. I really miss real books.
    - tsmarsh 8y ago
      I miss walking in a room of books. My parents had bookshelves that filled walls that I built with my Dad before they moved. I, and most other people that visited the house, would spend a fair amount of time just looking at the books on the shelf. Comparing notes on what they'd read, and asking to borrow books. Looking at the books, and being reminded of the experience you had with them or wanted to have with them was a vitally important part of the process that I fear we've lost.
shawn 8y ago
It seems like PDFs might still work in a hundred years. Just like zip files. Fun fact: HN's been around for 10% of a century. That makes Arc one of the longer-lived programming languages. Re: the ability to take books off the shelf and read it, Library Genesis has made a lot of progress in that area. http://libgen.io/ http://libgen.io/
- BlackFingolfin 8y ago
  PDFs might still work - but will the storage devices they are on? There are good reasons to doubt this: tapes, CDs and DVDs age and degrade over time; plus devices to read them only last so long, and may not be produced anymore at some point. Classic "spinning" hard drives degrade, too; and even ignoring this, will there still be conputers supporting, say, SATA, in 50 years? And then there is a trend to switch to onboard soldered flash in new devices which adds further problems. Not saying this is impossible to overcome, but "PDF might still work" is at best solving a part of the problem, for only a part of all data (PDF is great - but only for some types of data) one might want to preserve.
  - Koshkin 8y ago
    The cloud-based storage will never die. (And if it does, we'll have bigger problems on our hands than lost PDFs.)
ziaddotcom 8y ago
Seems like roms for emulators are becoming kind of book like. As soon as a new platform reaches market relevance, there is a dash to make sure these old platforms are emulated. However, rom files specifically (as opposed to executeables for retro computing platforms) seem to be distinctly less fickle in becoming reliably emulateable. The reason is seemingly simple, the early rom files were essentially an operating system, having all the software required to boot the system included in what now looks like one file.
joshschreuder 8y ago
Not sure I follow the logic; don't physical books suffer from similar downsides? Books degrade and libraries burn down. Seems a lot like bitrot and file mirrors disappearing.
- panic 8y ago
  Those downsides only apply to the book or software itself. My point was about the stuff you need to have apart from the book/software in order to read it. You need a computer to run software; all you need to read a book is an understanding of the language. It does get harder and harder to understand books over time, but not at the same rate that computers are changing (and language tends to stay relatively simple, anyway, because people have to be able to learn it).
JepZ 8y ago
There are very few people who want to read many books that are 1000 years old. The few books that interest more people can be converted to newer formats, the few people that want to read all old books will have to use extra tools to do so. That said, I am not a particular fan of books. They take a lot of physical space, are heavy and age. So as long as we stick to reasonable formats (e.g., text-based, non-binary), it should not be too hard for future generations to use our books. Using DRM, on the other hand, might make things complicated.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >There are very few people who want to read many books that are 1000 years old. That's their loss. There are very few people who want to learn math too.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  The Bible and the Koran would easily be on the world's best seller lists if they weren't excluded by default. You might argue - and I would agree - that this is not necessarily a good thing as far as content goes. But the point is that putting something into writing snd giving it a tangible form on paper gives it an inherent stability and authority missing from digital media. We tend of think of digital media as temporary, disposable, relatively low value simulacra of a Real Thing. Digital media can be hacked, edited, deleted, and lost when the power goes off. A copy of a book from hundreds or thousands of years ago is just going to sit there for some indefinite period. (Which actually depends on the quality of the paper - but in theory could be centuries.) This is not about practical reproduction and storage technologies, it's about persistence and tangibility. A book is a tangible object which has some independence from its surroundings. After printing, it's going to exist unless you destroy it. If you print many copies the contents are geographically distributed and it becomes very hard to destroy them all. A file depends on complex infrastructure. If the power goes down, it's gone. If the file format becomes obsolete, it's gone. (This has actually happened to many video and audio formats.) If there's an EMP event, it's gone. And it's not just a tangible difference, but a cultural. We have a fundamentally different relationship with digital data than we do with tangible objects, and this influences the value we place on their cultural payload.
doitLP 8y ago
True. Case in point, (the newly discovered 1300 year old book): http://www.openculture.com/2018/09/europes-oldest-intact-book-preserved-found-coffin-saint.html http://www.openculture.com/2018/09/europes-oldest-intact-boo...
Mizza 8y ago
This isn't for everybody, but I would say Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP), where words are sequentially presented in place to the reader, which has significantly changed the way I read. I wrote my own implementation of RSVP, which has eBook reader support, and now it is absolutely my preferred method of reading, and I read at 1000WPM. Though normal books are still enjoyable, they feel tedious and slow. The project is here: https://github.com/GlanceApps/Glance-Android https://github.com/GlanceApps/Glance-Android (It needs some help being updated for recent versions of Android, please let me know if you'd like to be involved! It has a new back-end API in place already and it just needs a few simple updates.)
- sincerely 8y ago
  Isn’t recall way worse for books “read” this way?
  - personlurking 8y ago
    Here is 1000wpm: https://youtu.be/7i9fZvWyLfI?t=1m41s https://youtu.be/7i9fZvWyLfI?t=1m41s I wouldn't recall a thing at this speed, nor at 600 which is shown just prior to the time stamp above.
    - Mizza 8y ago
      A few things here: This is a poor implementation of RSVP, as each word is being presented at the same speed. Longer words should be given longer presentation times, as should words with punctuation marks. The presentation of the words is also centered rather than aligned, which requires a saccade for each word, which defeats the whole point. It's also a difficult text to start out with, with no context. Even still, I didn't have a problem reading and recalling this text, though I wouldn't recommended it for a beginner.
      - unhingingdog 8y ago
        I made a similar app (iOS) which varies the display time by word length, punctuation, and each word's place in a list of the 100 most common words (under the assumption that common words contain less information, thus take less effort to read). To be honest, I'm not sure it works any better than one running at a constant speed. There seems to be a surprising lack of research in this area. (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/zipf/id1366685837?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/zipf/id1366685837?mt=8 if you're interested.)
petra 8y ago
>> > What's the successor to the book? And how could books be improved? First, what's the purpose of books ? There's entertainment of course. But let's focus on books that teach. Their purpose is to let you access some knowledge, in a deep way. On the other hand, computer systems are starting to fill that role, and the level of depth they can achieve is growing - on a good day, with the right query, Google may give you access to Amazing content, content that may help you connect different concepts - based on your past searches - just like your brain does. Another option is if it was easy for a book author to package her knowledge in a smart chatbot or maybe an expert system, and we will have hundreds of such advisors advising us, or just interactively chatting with us,correcting our mistakes, that would be an interesting replacement to the book.
NateEag 8y ago
I have thought about the difficulties of long-term storage for a while, and have come to the conclusion that digital mediums are inherently a poor choice for archiving and preserving data: http://howicode.nateeag.com/data-preservation.html http://howicode.nateeag.com/data-preservation.html As one of the more recent additions to that essay shows, I'm not the only one with that opinion: https://partners.nytimes.com/library/magazine/millennium/m6/capsule-panel.html https://partners.nytimes.com/library/magazine/millennium/m6/... As I note in the essay, there are some technologies that work better than others for preservation, but digital's biggest weaknesses are inherent, I think.
fuzzfactor 8y ago
>What's the successor to the book? The second edition. And how could books be improved? Until a different unpowered human-readable medium is proven over a longer period of more careless storage conditions, looks like a third edition if appropriate. If it hasn't been printed it hasn't really been published as thoroughly as it could be, and if it hasn't been bound then it's not yet a real book. Up until recent decades the survival of unique knowledge was largely dependent on the number of copies printed and distributed, so popularity has had undue importance. But don't let earlier editions become lost or woe on you.

by panic 8y ago

ramijames 8y ago

I love books, don't get me wrong, but they do age. This is especially true of books that are specialty related. Take a book from the 70s on computers, on medicine or psychology, on prehistory, on history, etc. They are all likely to be significantly outdated compared to their modern counterparts. There is much to be said for the modern way of information transference: it is always most up to date.

tsmarsh 8y ago
Whilst your core point about books aging is absolutely true I think thats mostly the mass market publications designed to ease entry than actual papers. Similarly, anything writen about an implementation is short lived. The Idiots Guide to Windows 98 is less useful today than it was in 1998 and is getting less useful with time. Lovelace, Babbage, Turing, McCarthy et al are still seminal. But these are academic papers that focus on what is possible to compute and how one might construct an implementation. There are some interesting edge cases too. Is the Gang of Four Design Patterns still relevent? Its not embarassing, but its not as applicable as it used to be.
- throwawaybbqed 8y ago
  As an aside, what would be today's ideal intro to design patterns? Now .. on topic ... I had a roomful of books collected from my youth. I cleaned out my room at my parents house some years ago ... and pretty much everything got chucked. The only books that I kept were seminal books like Knuth, Cormen, Gang of Four, TCP/IP series (v6 kinda makes them out-of-date too). All my MFC books ... java books .. pretty much all of it was out of date. I had an epiphany .. CS does not age well at all. I no longer buy physical books ... I got a subscription to Safari and love it. Also consume tons of content on e-learning platforms. But .. I really miss real books.
  - tsmarsh 8y ago
    I miss walking in a room of books. My parents had bookshelves that filled walls that I built with my Dad before they moved. I, and most other people that visited the house, would spend a fair amount of time just looking at the books on the shelf. Comparing notes on what they'd read, and asking to borrow books. Looking at the books, and being reminded of the experience you had with them or wanted to have with them was a vitally important part of the process that I fear we've lost.

shawn 8y ago

It seems like PDFs might still work in a hundred years. Just like zip files. Fun fact: HN's been around for 10% of a century. That makes Arc one of the longer-lived programming languages. Re: the ability to take books off the shelf and read it, Library Genesis has made a lot of progress in that area. http://libgen.io/ http://libgen.io/

BlackFingolfin 8y ago
PDFs might still work - but will the storage devices they are on? There are good reasons to doubt this: tapes, CDs and DVDs age and degrade over time; plus devices to read them only last so long, and may not be produced anymore at some point. Classic "spinning" hard drives degrade, too; and even ignoring this, will there still be conputers supporting, say, SATA, in 50 years? And then there is a trend to switch to onboard soldered flash in new devices which adds further problems. Not saying this is impossible to overcome, but "PDF might still work" is at best solving a part of the problem, for only a part of all data (PDF is great - but only for some types of data) one might want to preserve.
- Koshkin 8y ago
  The cloud-based storage will never die. (And if it does, we'll have bigger problems on our hands than lost PDFs.)

ziaddotcom 8y ago

Seems like roms for emulators are becoming kind of book like. As soon as a new platform reaches market relevance, there is a dash to make sure these old platforms are emulated. However, rom files specifically (as opposed to executeables for retro computing platforms) seem to be distinctly less fickle in becoming reliably emulateable. The reason is seemingly simple, the early rom files were essentially an operating system, having all the software required to boot the system included in what now looks like one file.

joshschreuder 8y ago

Not sure I follow the logic; don't physical books suffer from similar downsides? Books degrade and libraries burn down. Seems a lot like bitrot and file mirrors disappearing.

panic 8y ago
Those downsides only apply to the book or software itself. My point was about the stuff you need to have apart from the book/software in order to read it. You need a computer to run software; all you need to read a book is an understanding of the language. It does get harder and harder to understand books over time, but not at the same rate that computers are changing (and language tends to stay relatively simple, anyway, because people have to be able to learn it).

JepZ 8y ago

There are very few people who want to read many books that are 1000 years old. The few books that interest more people can be converted to newer formats, the few people that want to read all old books will have to use extra tools to do so. That said, I am not a particular fan of books. They take a lot of physical space, are heavy and age. So as long as we stick to reasonable formats (e.g., text-based, non-binary), it should not be too hard for future generations to use our books. Using DRM, on the other hand, might make things complicated.

coldtea 8y ago
>There are very few people who want to read many books that are 1000 years old. That's their loss. There are very few people who want to learn math too.
TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
The Bible and the Koran would easily be on the world's best seller lists if they weren't excluded by default. You might argue - and I would agree - that this is not necessarily a good thing as far as content goes. But the point is that putting something into writing snd giving it a tangible form on paper gives it an inherent stability and authority missing from digital media. We tend of think of digital media as temporary, disposable, relatively low value simulacra of a Real Thing. Digital media can be hacked, edited, deleted, and lost when the power goes off. A copy of a book from hundreds or thousands of years ago is just going to sit there for some indefinite period. (Which actually depends on the quality of the paper - but in theory could be centuries.) This is not about practical reproduction and storage technologies, it's about persistence and tangibility. A book is a tangible object which has some independence from its surroundings. After printing, it's going to exist unless you destroy it. If you print many copies the contents are geographically distributed and it becomes very hard to destroy them all. A file depends on complex infrastructure. If the power goes down, it's gone. If the file format becomes obsolete, it's gone. (This has actually happened to many video and audio formats.) If there's an EMP event, it's gone. And it's not just a tangible difference, but a cultural. We have a fundamentally different relationship with digital data than we do with tangible objects, and this influences the value we place on their cultural payload.

doitLP 8y ago

True. Case in point, (the newly discovered 1300 year old book): http://www.openculture.com/2018/09/europes-oldest-intact-book-preserved-found-coffin-saint.html http://www.openculture.com/2018/09/europes-oldest-intact-boo...

Mizza 8y ago

This isn't for everybody, but I would say Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP), where words are sequentially presented in place to the reader, which has significantly changed the way I read. I wrote my own implementation of RSVP, which has eBook reader support, and now it is absolutely my preferred method of reading, and I read at 1000WPM. Though normal books are still enjoyable, they feel tedious and slow. The project is here: https://github.com/GlanceApps/Glance-Android https://github.com/GlanceApps/Glance-Android (It needs some help being updated for recent versions of Android, please let me know if you'd like to be involved! It has a new back-end API in place already and it just needs a few simple updates.)

sincerely 8y ago
Isn’t recall way worse for books “read” this way?
- personlurking 8y ago
  Here is 1000wpm: https://youtu.be/7i9fZvWyLfI?t=1m41s https://youtu.be/7i9fZvWyLfI?t=1m41s I wouldn't recall a thing at this speed, nor at 600 which is shown just prior to the time stamp above.
  - Mizza 8y ago
    A few things here: This is a poor implementation of RSVP, as each word is being presented at the same speed. Longer words should be given longer presentation times, as should words with punctuation marks. The presentation of the words is also centered rather than aligned, which requires a saccade for each word, which defeats the whole point. It's also a difficult text to start out with, with no context. Even still, I didn't have a problem reading and recalling this text, though I wouldn't recommended it for a beginner.
    - unhingingdog 8y ago
      I made a similar app (iOS) which varies the display time by word length, punctuation, and each word's place in a list of the 100 most common words (under the assumption that common words contain less information, thus take less effort to read). To be honest, I'm not sure it works any better than one running at a constant speed. There seems to be a surprising lack of research in this area. (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/zipf/id1366685837?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/zipf/id1366685837?mt=8 if you're interested.)

petra 8y ago

>> > What's the successor to the book? And how could books be improved? First, what's the purpose of books ? There's entertainment of course. But let's focus on books that teach. Their purpose is to let you access some knowledge, in a deep way. On the other hand, computer systems are starting to fill that role, and the level of depth they can achieve is growing - on a good day, with the right query, Google may give you access to Amazing content, content that may help you connect different concepts - based on your past searches - just like your brain does. Another option is if it was easy for a book author to package her knowledge in a smart chatbot or maybe an expert system, and we will have hundreds of such advisors advising us, or just interactively chatting with us,correcting our mistakes, that would be an interesting replacement to the book.

NateEag 8y ago

I have thought about the difficulties of long-term storage for a while, and have come to the conclusion that digital mediums are inherently a poor choice for archiving and preserving data: http://howicode.nateeag.com/data-preservation.html http://howicode.nateeag.com/data-preservation.html As one of the more recent additions to that essay shows, I'm not the only one with that opinion: https://partners.nytimes.com/library/magazine/millennium/m6/capsule-panel.html https://partners.nytimes.com/library/magazine/millennium/m6/... As I note in the essay, there are some technologies that work better than others for preservation, but digital's biggest weaknesses are inherent, I think.

fuzzfactor 8y ago

>What's the successor to the book? The second edition. And how could books be improved? Until a different unpowered human-readable medium is proven over a longer period of more careless storage conditions, looks like a third edition if appropriate. If it hasn't been printed it hasn't really been published as thoroughly as it could be, and if it hasn't been bound then it's not yet a real book. Up until recent decades the survival of unique knowledge was largely dependent on the number of copies printed and distributed, so popularity has had undue importance. But don't let earlier editions become lost or woe on you.