Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."

blog.findings.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 66 posts

Re: Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."

#21

Post by HSO »

khafra wrote: post #15
HSO wrote: post #12

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…

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/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.

Re: Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."

#22

Post by HSO »

hyperbovine wrote: post #18
HSO wrote: post #12

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…

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.

Re: Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."

#24

Post by levesque »

SatvikBeri wrote: post #11
jellicle wrote: post #7

Current e-ink screens take more or less a full second to refresh, which makes a mockery of skimming. You can't skim through the entire contents of a website yet either - but you should be able to! Hint, hint, startup people.

This is why I prefer reading on the iPad or a laptop as opposed to a Kindle. While a Kindle is certainly easier on the eyes, being able to quickly flip through pages and search through a book is just too great to give up.

Is it? I never found myself wanting for such an ability. For me, the e-ink display is much more interesting than dynamic scrolling/skimming.

Re: Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."

#26

Post by rkudeshi »

mrspeaker wrote: post #16

I was thinking it would be cool (well, it might only work for me...) to have a "skim" mode on e-readers which let skip, say, 8 pages at a time - but the screen would be horizontally split into 8 sections to show the text from each of the 8 pages. I only need to see a snippet of text to remind me "oh yeah, it was around here somewhere..." I should whip up a proof-of-concept to test it, I guess.

Do iOS apps have access to one's personal library in iBooks? (The same way music apps like LyricWiki can access your music on an iPhone, I mean.)

If so, we could keep the canonical version of our ebook libraries in iBooks and have additional apps that can access the content in myriad and interesting ways. It would allow the main iBooks app to remain simple and focused, while allowing useful innovations to sprout up around it.

Re: Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."

#27

Post by arkitaip »

HSO wrote: post #12

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…

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/

Re: Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."

#28

Post by darasen »

yock wrote: post #23

For me, this problem is manifested in referencing bible verses. I love my Kindle, but use it once and you quickly learn that it wasn't designed for random access.

This. Try opening right to Mathew on an e-reader. Then try to realize you need to take a look at another scripture so you keep your finger between the pages you are on flip back a bit read what you need then then easily return to where you were. This holds true in programming books as well.

As pointed out note tasking is less natural in digital format.

In many books, such as DnD books, I know I can find certain rules (or other needed information,) by about where they are in the book.

Re: Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."

#29

Post by yew »

HSO wrote: post #21
khafra wrote: post #15

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…

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.

Re: Author Steven Johnson on what e-books are missing: "Skimming."

#30

Post by pagekalisedown »

HSO wrote: post #12

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…

Apple has the technology, see:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61336

Post reply on HN