61–66 of 66 posts
The worst ebook feature is that the Kindle only stores max(last_read_page, current_page). This means that if you follow a footnote to the end of the book, your reading position is lost forever. This makes flipping through the book a mentally-expensive proposition. (The screen refresh also makes this impossible.) I'm a big ebook fan, but only for novels or books that read like them. (Which is 90% of the reading I do,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
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 a…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If they open up the API, someone can do something about it.
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 a…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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/p…