6 ms·

Skimming is the least of it. Current ebooks, in their linear form, are essentially the equivalent of 19th century horse carriages with motors. "Books" need to b

by HSO 15y ago

Skimming is the least of it. Current ebooks, in their linear form, are essentially the equivalent of 19th century horse carriages with motors. "Books" need to be reimagined. While reading is and will remain a fundamentally linear activity, there is no reason why books need to be. For example: Why is text presented flatly? Isn't that a direct consequence of the limitation of physical paper? Where are the ebooks that allow you to dynamically fold text according to hierarchical order? In a mathematical text, say, sometimes I'd like to highlight the core results; other times, I want to home in on a particular result and highlight the "path" (i.e. the "helper thms" that are needed to establish the core result). Yet other times, I'd like to see the connection between results across sections _on the page_, i.e. without paging back and forth and holding everything in short-term memory. Sometimes I want the author's comments and discussion and "connective tissue"; other times, I don't want to see anything but the structure. Apple did a good thing, a first step with the option to generate flashcards from your highlighting and notes. This is one extremely obvious thing that ebooks were missing, although I think the implementation is not yet very good, rather clumsy in fact. Sometimes I get frustrated that people keep making ebooks as if they were still limit to the same physical constraints as paper books. The whole form and structure and interaction could be made much more malleable, such that the presentation of ideas "adapts" to your brain rather than your brain adapting to a successive, linear, "rectangular", fixed presentation and compensating for it. It's not like "ebooks" simply means adding a bit of "multimedia" like it's the 90s...

khafra 15y ago
Wow, fascinating ideas. It'd be amazing to have a textbook that had "adaptive abstraction levels" that let you read only the parts you needed detail on in detail, while tying the rest together in a high-level model that made it more useful; and had several different models into which the data fit, letting you read through the same material in the logical order of each model.
- HSO 15y ago
  Before I migrated my entire library to my computer, I sometimes made carbon copies and cut the theorems out just to reach this sort of effect. Then I could reshuffle and have what I want in front of me instead of flipping around in a book (or across several books) which I hated for the sheer physicality of it. Nowadays, when I read mostly papers in PDF or books I have scanned in or ebooks, I do screenshots and copy/paste to OmniOutliner, an outliner program. It's all still a hack though. I'm still waiting for a clean way from within standard ebook reading apps. For example, an API by iBooks that would allow any 3rd party flashcard app to interact with my notes/highlights. I used to think this use case is so obvious that it'd be a matter of months that someone would come up with a way to make it more easy to both read and write/organize content this way. As it is, now I'm increasingly asking myself whether I'm an exception or whether this is not the way non-literary books _should_ be read after all.
  - yew 15y ago
    Having some structure is useful when you don't know what you're looking for, or even what kind of thing you're looking for. And I find that's true of a lot of the technical documents I read. I also quite enjoy reading a physical book with a dozen bookmarks and fingers, being able to see several full pages of text at once. I could see your way of doing things being useful, though. I suspect it hasn't been partly because it's harder than it sounds (look at the design process for HTML, and all of the mistakes that were made and alternatives that were proposed) and partly because so much of the relevant IP (and thus market) is already locked up pretty tightly.
    - HSO 15y ago
      I agree about the structure. The thing about most technical, or how to call them, non-literary? books is that clearly you are not expected to read everything. In a sense, you start with the given structure but make the book your own as you go along. You skim, see that you already know about this, that you are not interested in that, and are _very_ interested in that. What I'd like to see is a format that makes it easy and gives us new possibilities to make a book our own. What I didn't see is your second point. Perhaps I imagined it too easy, maybe it is actually a tough nut to crack. After all, the format must accomodate all sorts of books and styles. And the IP issue, oh my...
  - dubya 15y ago
    Allowing 3rd party apps to access iBook notes and highlights would be useful, but will probably never happen. It's one of the weak points of the app model that there's not any good way to work with other programs' data. On the desktop, you could probably write a script to read annotations from a PDF and dump them into something like SuperMemo, but on tablets you need everyone to agree on a format to export so you can email them to yourself. Maybe Android is better about this.
hyperbovine 15y ago
I read a lot of math too and the points you raise are good ones. I bought a Kindle DX in hopes of jettisoning a large part of my hardcopy math library; thanks to TeX, a huge swath of math literature is available by PDF (most of it free, if you have university access). I guess I wasn't prepared for how cumbersome it would be. Flipping back 10 pages to check a lemma takes, well, 10 seconds. It really detracts from the study experience. That said, if I may play devil's advocate for a second, another way to look at the linear structure imposed by print is as a useful constraint for conveying thoughts in an effective manner. Every once in a while, I come across a "classic", math or otherwise, where the author has put so much thought into structuring her argument that I don't need to flip around. Invariably I absorb more from these rare gems than I would from a sort of hypertext arrangement, simply because somebody thought hard about the best way to learn the material. It's funny you mention Apple because this strikes me as a very Apple thing to do--impose something on its users which initially seems quite cumbersome (one-button mouse, no floppy, one-button cell phone, no CD/DVD, hell the whole HIG), but actually turns out to be a clever mechanism for enhancing usability.
- HSO 15y ago
  I totally know what you mean, I appreciate the craftsmanship too that went into such gems. It's like knowing you are in "good hands" ;-) Still, I would appreciate if the form would give me the option to "mess" with it sometimes, e.g. suppressing some stuff that I may or may not come back to later after a first glance; or generating quick links between passages (for example, a proof uses a previous result, can I quickly link back to it); or when I point at a technical term, can I see the formal definition from the text. etc etc. That would be amazing.
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  It occurs to me, you could submit a feature request to Amazon... "while reading, type CTRL+5 to go forward 5 pages, ALT+5 to go back" or something like that. Of course this would be cumbersome on the keyboardless models, but they are designed purely for novellas et al anyways.
  - shriphani 15y ago
jonnathanson 15y ago
It's actually pretty disheartening how few e-reader-native e-books there are these days. Most of the e-books I read are simply reformatted paper books. The better ones -- and, anecdotally, I'd say these represent 5% of the e-books I own -- have hyperlinked chapters. It's pretty clear that the big publishers are still treating e-book editions as afterthoughts. No doubt this will change. E-book consumption is rising rapidly, and it's abundantly clear that the e-reader/tablet/etc. is the future of the industry. But right now, the e-book is still in its infancy, and publishers haven't yet shifted their priorities in its favor.
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  This is basically why I pay money for Amazon e-books.
arkitaip 15y ago
Your ideas remind me of "Up and Down The Ladder of Abstraction", a great piece on the future of interactive documents and how far existing standards can take us. http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/ http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/
pagekalisedown 15y ago
Apple has the technology, see: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61336 http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61336
nodata 15y ago
I find ebooks perfect for fiction - and useless for everything else. Do you have any ideas on how to improve ebooks for fiction?
- HSO 15y ago
  I don't read lots of fiction lately but the one thing that bugs me is how clumsy sharing (of short passages, memorable quotes etc) is. Imagine you could just share a memorable sentence or passage to twitter or FB or whatever directly from within your ebook app. And the quote should have a link to a source, for example Google Books or the Kindle web app, such that your friends or followers could see an excerpt of the source if they clicked on it. If you were so inclined, you could even turn the generated link into an affiliate one.
  - skymt 15y ago
    I'm don't know about the Kindle app, but Kindle devices have Facebook and Twitter sharing built in. Once you link to your account, you can just select some text and tweet it.
magicalist 15y ago
Yes, we really need some kind of "hypertext" that allows an expression of "hyperlinks" between concepts so that a reader can follow conceptual paths through a corpus of text at will :) I agree with you wholeheartedly, actually. It has been disappointing that the advances in electronic textbooks have, as you say, given us the equivalent of scanned-in copies of the old textbooks, but with some embedded encarta video clips. The main problem, as efforts with XML and microdata and the semantic web (etc, etc) have taught us, is that this (parsing structure, displaying it, and allowing manipulation of that display) is really hard to solve in the general case, and even solutions that get you only part of the way may be so onerous that no one wants to actually author content at that point. There are a few startups that are instead trying to solve this by producing great textbook content on a case-by-case basis, really thinking about what it means to try to transmit knowledge in a totally different medium. I think there is a huge opportunity there, so I'm hopeful that we'll see some really great innovation in that UI/UX space soon.
tzs 15y ago
I've wanted "expandable" math ebooks, which in some ways are similar to what you are describing. The way these would work is that in their initial, unexpanded state, everything is presented the way it would be presented to an expert in the field. For instance, if you are interested in seeing how the prime number theory is proved, the unexpanded view would present the proof the way it would be presented if it were a new result being published in a top analytic number theory journal. This would, of course, be over the head of most people--even most mathematicians who are not number theorists. This is where the "expandable" part comes in. For any part of the proof, you would be able to expand it. There would be several kinds of expansion available. 1. Horizontal expansion. This keeps the argument at the same level, but fills in more steps. 2. Vertical expansion. This is for when you run into something you don't know. It expands to give you the necessary background to continue. 3. Calculation expansion (I need a better name for this). This would be used for things like evaluation of integrals or solving differential equations or similar things that show up in the proof. It's for when you know how to evaluate integrals or solve differential equations, but just aren't seeing the particular substitution or integration by parts or whatever that makes this particular calculation work. The difference between calculation expansion and horizontal expansion is that calculation expansion is for where you need something expanded that is relatively elementary compared to the current level, whereas horizontal expansion is where you need more steps at the current level to follow the argument. All of these expansions would in an ideal expandable ebook be applicable recessively, with vertical expansion going all the way down to high school math. The net result would be if you took, say, an expandable ebook on the prime number theorem, and did maximum vertical expansion, you'd end up with in effect a course of study that takes you from high school to understanding the proof of the prime number theorem--it would teach you all the number theory and calculus and complex analysis and so on that you need to understand that proof.

by HSO 15y ago

khafra 15y ago

Wow, fascinating ideas. It'd be amazing to have a textbook that had "adaptive abstraction levels" that let you read only the parts you needed detail on in detail, while tying the rest together in a high-level model that made it more useful; and had several different models into which the data fit, letting you read through the same material in the logical order of each model.

HSO 15y ago
Before I migrated my entire library to my computer, I sometimes made carbon copies and cut the theorems out just to reach this sort of effect. Then I could reshuffle and have what I want in front of me instead of flipping around in a book (or across several books) which I hated for the sheer physicality of it. Nowadays, when I read mostly papers in PDF or books I have scanned in or ebooks, I do screenshots and copy/paste to OmniOutliner, an outliner program. It's all still a hack though. I'm still waiting for a clean way from within standard ebook reading apps. For example, an API by iBooks that would allow any 3rd party flashcard app to interact with my notes/highlights. I used to think this use case is so obvious that it'd be a matter of months that someone would come up with a way to make it more easy to both read and write/organize content this way. As it is, now I'm increasingly asking myself whether I'm an exception or whether this is not the way non-literary books _should_ be read after all.
- yew 15y ago
  Having some structure is useful when you don't know what you're looking for, or even what kind of thing you're looking for. And I find that's true of a lot of the technical documents I read. I also quite enjoy reading a physical book with a dozen bookmarks and fingers, being able to see several full pages of text at once. I could see your way of doing things being useful, though. I suspect it hasn't been partly because it's harder than it sounds (look at the design process for HTML, and all of the mistakes that were made and alternatives that were proposed) and partly because so much of the relevant IP (and thus market) is already locked up pretty tightly.
  - HSO 15y ago
    I agree about the structure. The thing about most technical, or how to call them, non-literary? books is that clearly you are not expected to read everything. In a sense, you start with the given structure but make the book your own as you go along. You skim, see that you already know about this, that you are not interested in that, and are _very_ interested in that. What I'd like to see is a format that makes it easy and gives us new possibilities to make a book our own. What I didn't see is your second point. Perhaps I imagined it too easy, maybe it is actually a tough nut to crack. After all, the format must accomodate all sorts of books and styles. And the IP issue, oh my...
- dubya 15y ago
  Allowing 3rd party apps to access iBook notes and highlights would be useful, but will probably never happen. It's one of the weak points of the app model that there's not any good way to work with other programs' data. On the desktop, you could probably write a script to read annotations from a PDF and dump them into something like SuperMemo, but on tablets you need everyone to agree on a format to export so you can email them to yourself. Maybe Android is better about this.

hyperbovine 15y ago

I read a lot of math too and the points you raise are good ones. I bought a Kindle DX in hopes of jettisoning a large part of my hardcopy math library; thanks to TeX, a huge swath of math literature is available by PDF (most of it free, if you have university access). I guess I wasn't prepared for how cumbersome it would be. Flipping back 10 pages to check a lemma takes, well, 10 seconds. It really detracts from the study experience. That said, if I may play devil's advocate for a second, another way to look at the linear structure imposed by print is as a useful constraint for conveying thoughts in an effective manner. Every once in a while, I come across a "classic", math or otherwise, where the author has put so much thought into structuring her argument that I don't need to flip around. Invariably I absorb more from these rare gems than I would from a sort of hypertext arrangement, simply because somebody thought hard about the best way to learn the material. It's funny you mention Apple because this strikes me as a very Apple thing to do--impose something on its users which initially seems quite cumbersome (one-button mouse, no floppy, one-button cell phone, no CD/DVD, hell the whole HIG), but actually turns out to be a clever mechanism for enhancing usability.

HSO 15y ago
I totally know what you mean, I appreciate the craftsmanship too that went into such gems. It's like knowing you are in "good hands" ;-) Still, I would appreciate if the form would give me the option to "mess" with it sometimes, e.g. suppressing some stuff that I may or may not come back to later after a first glance; or generating quick links between passages (for example, a proof uses a previous result, can I quickly link back to it); or when I point at a technical term, can I see the formal definition from the text. etc etc. That would be amazing.
sliverstorm 15y ago
It occurs to me, you could submit a feature request to Amazon... "while reading, type CTRL+5 to go forward 5 pages, ALT+5 to go back" or something like that. Of course this would be cumbersome on the keyboardless models, but they are designed purely for novellas et al anyways.
- shriphani 15y ago

jonnathanson 15y ago

It's actually pretty disheartening how few e-reader-native e-books there are these days. Most of the e-books I read are simply reformatted paper books. The better ones -- and, anecdotally, I'd say these represent 5% of the e-books I own -- have hyperlinked chapters. It's pretty clear that the big publishers are still treating e-book editions as afterthoughts. No doubt this will change. E-book consumption is rising rapidly, and it's abundantly clear that the e-reader/tablet/etc. is the future of the industry. But right now, the e-book is still in its infancy, and publishers haven't yet shifted their priorities in its favor.

sliverstorm 15y ago
This is basically why I pay money for Amazon e-books.

arkitaip 15y ago

Your ideas remind me of "Up and Down The Ladder of Abstraction", a great piece on the future of interactive documents and how far existing standards can take us. http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/ http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/

pagekalisedown 15y ago

Apple has the technology, see: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61336 http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61336

nodata 15y ago

I find ebooks perfect for fiction - and useless for everything else. Do you have any ideas on how to improve ebooks for fiction?

HSO 15y ago
I don't read lots of fiction lately but the one thing that bugs me is how clumsy sharing (of short passages, memorable quotes etc) is. Imagine you could just share a memorable sentence or passage to twitter or FB or whatever directly from within your ebook app. And the quote should have a link to a source, for example Google Books or the Kindle web app, such that your friends or followers could see an excerpt of the source if they clicked on it. If you were so inclined, you could even turn the generated link into an affiliate one.
- skymt 15y ago
  I'm don't know about the Kindle app, but Kindle devices have Facebook and Twitter sharing built in. Once you link to your account, you can just select some text and tweet it.

magicalist 15y ago

Yes, we really need some kind of "hypertext" that allows an expression of "hyperlinks" between concepts so that a reader can follow conceptual paths through a corpus of text at will :) I agree with you wholeheartedly, actually. It has been disappointing that the advances in electronic textbooks have, as you say, given us the equivalent of scanned-in copies of the old textbooks, but with some embedded encarta video clips. The main problem, as efforts with XML and microdata and the semantic web (etc, etc) have taught us, is that this (parsing structure, displaying it, and allowing manipulation of that display) is really hard to solve in the general case, and even solutions that get you only part of the way may be so onerous that no one wants to actually author content at that point. There are a few startups that are instead trying to solve this by producing great textbook content on a case-by-case basis, really thinking about what it means to try to transmit knowledge in a totally different medium. I think there is a huge opportunity there, so I'm hopeful that we'll see some really great innovation in that UI/UX space soon.

tzs 15y ago

I've wanted "expandable" math ebooks, which in some ways are similar to what you are describing. The way these would work is that in their initial, unexpanded state, everything is presented the way it would be presented to an expert in the field. For instance, if you are interested in seeing how the prime number theory is proved, the unexpanded view would present the proof the way it would be presented if it were a new result being published in a top analytic number theory journal. This would, of course, be over the head of most people--even most mathematicians who are not number theorists. This is where the "expandable" part comes in. For any part of the proof, you would be able to expand it. There would be several kinds of expansion available. 1. Horizontal expansion. This keeps the argument at the same level, but fills in more steps. 2. Vertical expansion. This is for when you run into something you don't know. It expands to give you the necessary background to continue. 3. Calculation expansion (I need a better name for this). This would be used for things like evaluation of integrals or solving differential equations or similar things that show up in the proof. It's for when you know how to evaluate integrals or solve differential equations, but just aren't seeing the particular substitution or integration by parts or whatever that makes this particular calculation work. The difference between calculation expansion and horizontal expansion is that calculation expansion is for where you need something expanded that is relatively elementary compared to the current level, whereas horizontal expansion is where you need more steps at the current level to follow the argument. All of these expansions would in an ideal expandable ebook be applicable recessively, with vertical expansion going all the way down to high school math. The net result would be if you took, say, an expandable ebook on the prime number theorem, and did maximum vertical expansion, you'd end up with in effect a course of study that takes you from high school to understanding the proof of the prime number theorem--it would teach you all the number theory and calculus and complex analysis and so on that you need to understand that proof.