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I don't read web articles anymore, but I read books

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Re: I don't read web articles anymore, but I read books

#261
post #67

I reached a similar point. Articles became an immediate skip because I started expecting the site to show a paywall or a email signup, or a block of links after each paragraph...it was exhausting. The solution to this was to save the article as a PDF and drop it in a 'read later' folder. The PDFs are synced to my phone via Syncthing Fork, and look great on my foldable phone. You can make PDFs in A5 format so they're…

EinkBro is a browser aimed at, as the name suggests, e-ink devices. That said, it has some really useful features, including a "save as ePub" option.

This not only solves the "format the document for my device", as ePub is a liquid-layout format, but also allows you to combine a number of articles into a single file (you can add more later), which is useful for organising reading by topic, project, or date. And you can read the articles using dedicated e-book software (Kobo, PocketBook Reader, FBReader, or native e-reader apps). I've found that especially useful.

More: https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/107958709435468728>

(For Android only AFAIU.)

https://f-droid.org/en/packages/info.plateaukao.einkbro/>

Re: I don't read web articles anymore, but I read books

#262
post #18

I’m a firm believer that the UX of reading physical books beats every other alternative. Looking forward to when this is no longer the case.

What's underappreciated by many is how much the book is a highly-crafted and optimised product.

There's very little about a book that's innate, rather, conventions from size to font to structure and organisation, contents, indices, notes, pagination for eff's sake, all had to be arrived at and designed.

That's happened over centuries, and represents a great deal of embedded wisdom.

I become painfully aware of this when reading online, whether on desktop (can be OK with a suitably large screen), laptop (horrible), OLED tablet (OK, but not great), or e-ink device (far better, though still has limitations).

A book's robustness, persistence, and flexibility of access are hard to match. Digital gives options for search, access, and automation, which can be handy.

What most plagues online book formats, I'm concluding after using an e-ink device for nearly two years, is displays. Emissive, low-resolution, wrong format, and difficulty in reading under bright illumination. E-ink addresses most of these (at sufficient size: 8" minimum, 10" or 13" is preferable for detailed works).

That still leaves a lot to the specific technical format and typography of individual e-books, and there are designs which work better than others.

There's also the mechanics of ebook reader software, most especially of navigation and annotation. The directness of physical objects (leafing or flipping through pages, scribbling a quick note in pencil or pen, dog-earing, physical bookmarks) is lost, though good designs can come reasonably close.

(I'm trying to find a book on, erm, The Book, which I'd found and believe is somewhere in my (electronic) collection, though it's been eluding me for the past quarter hour or so.)

Edit: Found it. Keith Houston, The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time (2016)

https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393244793>

https://archive.org/details/bookcovertocover0000hous>

https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=5D3A0B91464FE40568F5BBA...>

https://www.worldcat.org/title/956980330>

Not without some irony, a book which is far better in print or PDF than ePub format.

Re: I don't read web articles anymore, but I read books

#263

Do you think it's something to do with the medium, rather than the content? I am an avid book-collector and much prefer to pick up a technical manual and find guidance there, but at the same time my job demands fluency with online documentation, plus e.g. Stack Overflow, blog posts, etc. Personally I like the dead-tree feel and heft of a book, and the fact it doesn't require a screen or battery. I can curl up with it…

A good e-ink reader ... remains a compromise ... but it is a good compromise in many cases.

The fact that I can carry 100s or 1,000s of references with ease is especially useful.

The display is (mostly) reflective, works under direct sunlight, has exceptional battery life (when used only as an e-book reader, if you're surfing the Web or using apps, with WiFi and frontlighting enabled, it falls precipitously), and is very nearly as crisp as paper (200 DPI vs. 300--600 for most laserprinters).

Re: I don't read web articles anymore, but I read books

#264

The gate-keeping around reading is insane. A book is just long-form writing. Other than its length, a book is fundamentally no different than any other form of written communication. There are bad books just as there are bad blog posts. Length can be an important differentiator, for sure. But I don't ever see that as the topic of conversation. Only book vs blog vs tweet. Be more specific. Rather than just say "books"…

I'd say that most of the distinction between books and blogs / other online writing is about the process and result rather than of the physical form of the product itself, though that has some bearing (see my recent comments elsewhere in this thread).

If you're familiar with the literature on writing itself --- fiction or nonfiction --- what becomes clear is how books are crafted. There's the idea, often research, organisation of notes and the like, writing itself, and then very often many, many, many rounds of editing and proofing, which go towards a result which ideally reads well, is factually accurate (where such things matter), that educational materials follow good pedagogy, is well cited and referenced, has needless fat trimmed, etc., etc.

Traditional publishing has multiple edit and filter points, from initial acquisition through revisions and translations. The upside is (potentially) well-crafted works, the downside is that many proposals don't get green-lit. The promise of the Web was breaking that editorial chokepoint, which has its own pros and cons.

Yes, of course it's possible to craft bad books, and as The Good Book notes, there is no end.

But blogging and article-writing frequently cuts many of these corners. Yes, a domain-expert can write a good blog, and yes, the process of blogging itself can be part of the process of book-creation, with feedback and corrections to the (error-prone, roughly-hewn) blog posts itself contributing to that finished product.

Books based on dialogues, lectures, commentaries, and essays are also a timeless form (Plato, Sun Tzu, Al-Kindi, Averroes, Smith's The Wealth of Nations, Feynman's Physics, all come to mind), and that's one useful way of coming up with a book-length compendium of material, though the result may lack in an overall coherence. (Overall coherence of course is not the principle goal of such compendia, rather, it is to create a usefully-curated set of realated or interacting works.)

I've been increasingly disappointed in the focus of many early digital-text pioneers on creating an end result that's specific to the domain, rather than on the process of writing works which is afforded by digital tools to increase capability and usefulness of something which, after all, ultimately is read in a linear fashion, if not necessarily how the author or publisher lineralised it. Reading is finding a path through text, the presented structure is itself only one path. We read novels through; we work through textbooks; we consult or query dictionaries, phone directories (if you remember those), and encyclopedias.

Concepts such as Niklas Luhmann's Zettlekasten, whilst analogue and paper-based are far more innovative in the sense of restructuring the authoring process itself. More modern tools would include Zotero and Calibre, perhaps.

https://zettelkasten.de/introduction/>

Re: I don't read web articles anymore, but I read books

#265

I feel happier reading a book. I also feel relieved when I open a book. I've been wondering why this is and I have a theory. The information on the internet is unbounded. You know this, you are aware even if subliminally, no matter how you control your browser by blocking ads, pop ups etc. An unbounded information horizon is destabilizing. There is always more (possibly better) information a click away. It's hard to…

The number and quality of online distractions is ... increasingly tiresome.

Even with adblock on my principle tablet browser, sites such as the Washington Post leave large whitespace gaps within an article where ad spots have been removed. I've counted through these manually at times and believe that there are frequently around ten, possibly more, ads withing the body of a story with not many more paragraphs than that.

Even before we get to sidebars, pop-ups, and other interstitials, it just makes me tired.

Reader Mode can remove many of these though even then some additional tuning may be required. A further problem is the lack of standardisation in how articles are structured, making assumptions about how to apply formatting also fraught.

(As a concrete example: I'm fond of bolding lead-lines of articles with a drop cap. Normally this can be applied to "p:first-of-type:first-line", except where, say, and article wraps each

tag in a or other element. Mind that this is a self-imposed problem. Point is that if document-structure conventions were followed, I'd be able to consistently use a cleaner styling. It isn't, so I cannot.)

Re: I don't read web articles anymore, but I read books

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on the fence about this. For the longest time I'd have 100% agreed with you, but more recently realized that there is value in just having my mind be exposed to the subject for a prolonged amount of time. Sometimes the more interesting insights will be mine, rather than what the content of the book was. It also helps with retention. Of course some books just still aren't worth it. My canonical positive example wo…

I completely agree with this. I’ve started to put more of an emphasis on “active” reading (for lack of a better word) in which I take what I’m reading and think it through for myself, rather than just passively accepting it. It is certainly slower than passively reading, but the result is that I actually understand the subject much better. You could read a dictionary definition of the word courage and vaguely underst…

Try to read a 'How to read a book', it's not easy one, but it explain what you just said.

Re: I don't read web articles anymore, but I read books

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you read the packtpub book? I'm very weary on buying from that publisher as I gotten burned too many times. IME they are often both poorly written and horridly incorrect. This was around 2018-ish so maybe they've gotten better but they definitely have the "self publish" stigma with little editorial guidance in my view. Not saying this is the case here, as the other looks decent and has a history of writing conte…

Oh wow, I have a special hatred for them. I bought one thing from them and then spent years trying to get off their email lists. It took me something like 12 separate email requests (plus who knows how many times clicking on unsubscribe links). As a company they are dead to me.

I was just in this dilemma to begin to eliminate accounts and random stuff I signed up for in periods of my life that are long gone. Many of them still have my email for some registration I made but have since eliminated all the emails and only get these annual privacy notice updates that seem mandated somehow. Even those I don't welcome because it's just another distraction to have to bother with.

At some point I wonder if these organizations realize that if they continue to dishonor unsubscribe attempts that they simply get marked at spam. In the context of gmail I always thought too many organizations that get marked as spam just hurts them beyond the user they did not honor. Does anyone know if this is so?

Re: I don't read web articles anymore, but I read books

#268

I feel the opposite. I'm reading fewer non-fiction books and more articles and blog posts. Non-fiction books are bloated with fluff to increase the page count to increase the perceived marketability of the book. A lot of the ideas presented in those books could be adequately presented in a 10th of the number of pages. A huge time-saver has been reading the article versions of stuff that has been turned into a book. Y…

I don’t know exactly when it happened, but nonfiction books have become 80% filler with a few dozen pages of worthwhile ideas. This didn’t use to be the case and if you read a popular book from say, 1910, they are often too information sense.

* dense

Re: I don't read web articles anymore, but I read books

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good example for such a bloated book is "Clean Architecture" by Robert C. Martin. The ideas of the book are more or less completely explained in a single blog post or one of his talks (about 1 hour), but the book has a few hundred pages (432) where he delves into history and talks to you about how he used archaic computers 40 years ago (to render himself as a veteran and to underline some point in the main text). A…

Have you read the packtpub book? I'm very weary on buying from that publisher as I gotten burned too many times. IME they are often both poorly written and horridly incorrect. This was around 2018-ish so maybe they've gotten better but they definitely have the "self publish" stigma with little editorial guidance in my view. Not saying this is the case here, as the other looks decent and has a history of writing conte…

Yes, I read the book and it is quite good. That is not the merit of the publisher, but the merit of the author. You can buy the book (more or less) directly from the author on https://leanpub.com/get-your-hands-dirty-on-clean-architectu... , so PacktPub seems only to be the printing partner.

Re: I don't read web articles anymore, but I read books

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good example for such a bloated book is "Clean Architecture" by Robert C. Martin. The ideas of the book are more or less completely explained in a single blog post or one of his talks (about 1 hour), but the book has a few hundred pages (432) where he delves into history and talks to you about how he used archaic computers 40 years ago (to render himself as a veteran and to underline some point in the main text). A…

Is this a good example of one of those talks? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dKZ-dWaCiU&ab_channel=ITkon...

Yes, this is one of those talks. The book doesn't really cover much more.
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