reading | Chris Aldrich

👓 Reading, Anxiety, Possibility | Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Kathleen Fitzpatrick)

Every so often you come across That Book, the exact thing you need to read, and a lot of the time it’s something that you might not have run into before and that you certainly had no idea you neede…

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

dismissing pleasure in reading (whether as illicit, or unserious, or whathaveyou) opens space for anxiety to become one’s dominant reading affect, and particularly “anxiety about whether we’re reading the right stuff, or reading for the right reasons, or reading in the right way.” ❧

👓 Announcing indiebookclub | gRegorLove.com

Read Announcing indiebookclub by

gRegor Morrill (gregorlove.com)

I’m pleased to announce a new project I have been working on. indiebookclub is an app for keeping track of the books you are reading or want to read. It is primarily intended to help you own your data by posting directly to your own site with Micropub. If your site does not support Micropub yet, y...

This portends some awesome things to come. Can’t wait to get this working and see what pieces come along with it later. This is going to make it much easier to leave silos like GoodReads.com.

🔖 Identifying Modes of User Engagement with Online News and Their Relationship to Information Gain in Text by Nir Grinberg

Bookmarked Identifying Modes of User Engagement with Online News and Their Relationship to Information Gain in Text by

Nir Grinberg (dl.acm.org)

Prior work established the benefits of server-recorded user engagement measures (e.g. clickthrough rates) for improving the results of search engines and recommendation systems. Client-side measures of post-click behavior received relatively little attention despite the fact that publishers have now the ability to measure how millions of people interact with their content at a fine resolution using client-side logging. In this study, we examine patterns of user engagement in a large, client-side log dataset of over 7.7 million page views (including both mobile and non-mobile devices) of 66,821 news articles from seven popular news publishers. For each page view we use three summary statistics: dwell time, the furthest position the user reached on the page, and the amount of interaction with the page through any form of input (touch, mouse move, etc.). We show that simple transformations on these summary statistics reveal six prototypical modes of reading that range from scanning to extensive reading and persist across sites. Furthermore, we develop a novel measure of information gain in text to capture the development of ideas within the body of articles and investigate how information gain relates to the engagement with articles. Finally, we show that our new measure of information gain is particularly useful for predicting reading of news articles before publication, and that the measure captures unique information not available otherwise.

Bookmarked to read as result of reading The five ways we read online (and what publishers can do to encourage the “good” ones).

[.pdf] copy available on author’s site.

👓 Librarian tweetstorm by @green_grainger

Read Librarian tweetstorm by Georgia | Saoirse (Twitter)

So there was a MYSTERY at the library today.

A wee old women came in and said "I've a question. Why does page 7 in all the books I take out have the 7 underlined in pen? It seems odd."
"What?" I say, thinking she might be a bit off her rocker. She showed me, and they did.

I asked if she was doing it, she said she wasnt and showed me the new book she was getting out that she hadnt even had yet. It also had the 7 underlined! "I don't know, maybe someone really likes page 7?" I said, assuming of course that there is a serial killer in the library.

I checked some other books. Most didn't have it, but a lot in this genre did - they're "wee old women" books (romances set in wartime Britain etc). Lots of underlined 7s. The woman who pointed it out shrugged and went on her way, "just thought you should know".

My manager came back from doing arts and crafts with some of the kids and I decide to tell her about the serial killer in the library.
And that’s how I found out that a lot of our elderly clientele have secret codes to mark which books they’ve read before.

Our computers do it automatically but many have been doing it since before that was possible, so Esther might underline page 7, while Anne might draw a little star on the last page, and Fred might put an “f” on the title page. Then when they pick it up, they can check!

It’s quite clever really but now I’m dying to just underline page 7 of every new wee old women book we get in.

So, good news: there’s not a serial killer in the library whose MO include the number 7 and wartime romances. Bad news: people are defacing books rather than just asking us to scan them (smiling face with smiling eyes)

I'm now concerned that the amount of people enjoying this thread means there's going to be a new spate of readers using secret codes - apologies to librarians everywhere!
(although, in truth, I find it hard to be annoyed about it - better than torn pages and felt pen graffiti!)

(Also, I am new to the library job, hence why I hadn't seen it before! The library and our customers are great though (smiling face with smiling eyes))

Just had another victim of the page 7 vandal returned!!!
(Now checking every book that looks like it might be their taste...)

This is such an interesting little story including some cultural anthropology.

👓 For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here’s What I Learned. | New York Times

Read For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here’s What I Learned. by Farhad Manjoo (nytimes.com)

Our tech columnist tried to skip digital news for a while. His old-school experiment led to three main conclusions.

A somewhat link-baity headline, but overall a nice little article with some generally solid advice. I always thought that even the daily paper was at too quick a pace and would much prefer a weekly or monthly magazine that does a solid recap of all the big stories and things one ought to know, that way the stories had had some time to simmer and all the details had time to come out. Kind of like reading longer form non-fiction of periods of history, just done on a somewhat shorter timescale.

Chris Aldrich is reading “The Readability bookmarking service will shut down on September 30, 2016.”

Read The Readability bookmarking service will shut down on September 30, 2016 by Readability (Medium)

After more than five years of operation, the Readability article bookmarking/read-it-later service will be shutting down after September 30…

I really wish I’d heard about this before September! And certainly before today… I know I used it fairly frequently in the early days of the service. I do remember that they did have a some nice functionality for sending articles to the Amazon Kindle too. Not sure how much data I may have lost in this particular shutdown, but I do wish I’d had a chance to back it up.

I am glad that bookmarks are one of the post types that I’m now saving by posting on my own site first though. For more of my thoughts on these post types, take a look at:

Chris Aldrich is reading “I Had Ten Dollars / Greg Leppert – Reading.am”

Read I Had Ten Dollars / Greg Leppert - Reading.am (ihadtendollars.com)

Interview with Greg Leppert. Founder of Reading.am. Co-founder of Svpply. Reads a lot.

Chris Aldrich is reading “Instapaper is joining Pinterest”

Read Instapaper is joining Pinterest (blog.instapaper.com)

Today, we’re excited to announce that Instapaper is joining Pinterest. In the three years since betaworks acquired Instapaper from Marco Arment, we’ve completely rewritten our backend, overhauled our mobile and web clients, improved parsing and search, and introduced tons of great features like highlights, text-to-speech, and speed reading to the product.