Read Ebooks Are an Abomination by Ian BogostIan Bogost (The Atlantic)
If you hate them, it’s not your fault.
Ian Bogost has a nice look at the UI affordances and areas for growth in the e-reading space.

A🧵 of annotations
theatlantic.com/books/archive/…

What any individual infers about their hopes and dreams for an e-reader derives from their understanding of reading in the first place. You can’t have books without bookiness. Bookiness. That’s the word Glenn Fleishman, a technology writer and longtime bookmaker, uses to describe the situation. “It’s the essence that makes someone feel like they’re using a book,” he told me. Like pornography or sandwiches, you know bookiness when you see it. Or feel it? Either way, most people can’t identify what it is in the abstract.

definition: bookiness

Does this only come out because there’s something that’s book-tangential or similar and it needs to exist to describe the idea of not-book, book-adjacent, or book-like on some sort of spectrum of bookishness.
Annotated on September 18, 2021 at 12:28PM

The ancient Romans sometimes connected wax tablets with leather or cords, suggesting a prototype of binding. Replacing the wax with leaves allowed many pages to be stacked atop one another, then sewn or otherwise bound together. 

early book prototypes
Annotated on September 18, 2021 at 12:30PM

In other words, as far as technologies go, the book endures for very good reason. Books work. 

Aside from reading words to put ideas into my brain, one of the reasons I like to read digital words is that the bigger value proposition for me is an easier method to add annotations to what I’m reading and then to be able to manipulate those notes after-the-fact. I’ve transcended books and the manual methods of note taking. Until I come up with a better word for it, digital commonplacing seems to be a useful shorthand for this new pattern of reading.
Annotated on September 18, 2021 at 12:33PM

If you have a high-quality hardbound book nearby, pick it up and look at the top and bottom edges of the binding, near the spine, with the book closed. The little stripey tubes you see are called head and tail bands (one at the top, one at the bottom). They were originally invented to reinforce stitched binding, to prevent the cover from coming apart from the leaves. Today’s mass-produced hardcover books are glued rather than sewn, which makes head and tail bands purely ornamental. And yet for those who might notice, a book feels naked without such details. 

It is an odd circumstance that tail bands are still used on modern books that don’t need them. From a manufacturing standpoint, the decrease in cost would dictate they disappear, however they must add some level of bookiness that they’re worth that cost.
Annotated on September 18, 2021 at 12:37PM

One site of that erosion, which may help explain ebook reticence, can be found in self-published books. For people predisposed to sneer at the practice, a lack of editing or the absence of publisher endorsement and review might justify self-published works’ second-class status. That matter is debatable. More clear is the consequence of disintermediation: Nobody takes a self-published manuscript and lays it out for printing in a manner that conforms with received standards. And so you often end up with a perfect-bound Word doc instead of a book. That odd feeling of impropriety isn’t necessarily a statement about the trustworthiness of the writer or their ideas, but a sense of dissonance at the book as an object. It’s an eerie gestalt, a foreboding feeling of unbookiness. 

Having helped others to self-publish in the past, I definitely do spend a bit of time putting the small sort of bookiness flourishes into their texts.
Annotated on September 18, 2021 at 12:41PM

The weird way you tap or push a whole image of a page to the side—it’s the uncanny valley of page turning, not a simulation or replacement of it. 

This may be the first time I’ve seen uncanny valley applied to a topic other than recognizing people versus robots or related simulacra.
Annotated on September 18, 2021 at 12:44PM

The iPad’s larger screen also scales down PDF pages to fit, making the results smaller than they would be in print. It also displays simulated print margins inside the bezel margin of the device itself, a kind of mise en abyme that still can’t actually be used for the things margins are used for, such as notes or dog-ears. 

It would be quite nice if a digital reader would allow actual writing in the margins, or even overlaying the text itself and then allowing the looking at the two separately.

I do quite like the infinite annotation space that Hypothes.is gives me on a laptop. I wish there were UI for it on a Kindle in a more usable and forgiving way. The digital keyboard on Kindle Paperwhite is miserable. I’ve noticed that I generally prefer reading and annotating on desktop in a browser now for general ease-of-use.

Also, I don’t see enough use of mise en abyme. This is a good one.

In Western art history, mise en abyme (French pronunciation: ​[miz ɑ̃n‿abim]; also mise en abîme) is a formal technique of placing a copy of an image within itself, often in a way that suggests an infinitely recurring sequence. In film theory and literary theory, it refers to the technique of inserting a story within a story. The term is derived from heraldry and literally means “placed into abyss”. It was first appropriated for modern criticism by the French author André Gide.

Annotated on September 18, 2021 at 12:49PM

Ebook devices are extremely compatible with an idea of bookiness that values holding and carrying a potentially large number of books at once; that prefers direct flow from start to finish over random access; that reads for the meaning and force of the words as text first, if not primarily; and that isn’t concerned with the use of books as stores of reader-added information or as memory palaces. 

Intriguing reference of a book as a memory palace here.

The verso/recto and top/middle/bottom is a piece of digital books that I do miss from the physical versions as it serves as a mnemonic journey for me to be able to remember what was where.

I wonder if Ian Bogost uses the method of loci?
Annotated on September 18, 2021 at 12:53PM

So do all manner of other peculiarities of form, including notations of editions on the verso (the flip side) of the full title page and the running headers all throughout that rename the book you are already reading. 

I do dislike the running headers of digital copies of books as most annotation tools want to capture those headers in the annotation. It would be nice if they were marked up in an Aria-like method so that annotation software would semantically know to ignore them.
Annotated on September 18, 2021 at 12:56PM

Skimming through pages, the foremost feature of the codex, remains impossible in digital books. 

This is related to an idea that Tom Critchlow was trying to get at a bit the other day. It would definitely be interesting in this sort of setting.

Annotated on September 18, 2021 at 01:03PM

“We’ve been thoughtful,” Amazon continued, “about adding only features and experiences that preserve and enhance the reading experience.” The question of whose experience doesn’t seem to come up. 

They’re definitely not catering to my reading, annotating, and writing experience.
Annotated on September 18, 2021 at 01:04PM

I got sidetracked tonight and jumped into the rabbithole that is Pollen and Racket, which I’ve been tempted to look into for several years for simultaneously publishing both websites and books. 

In just a few minutes in a quick demo, I’ve been able to build a local website. This seems a bit easier than I had initially expected, but there’s still a way to go…

Read How to read ebooks purchased from Kobo on a Kindle by Jeremy Felt (jeremyfelt.com)
When an ebook is not available directly through a publisher, I’d like to purchase it through Kobo rather than Amazon. A nice part of Kobo is the option to associate your account with an independent bookstore. Once associated, the store receives some amount of money for any ebook you purchase. This...
This is almost exactly the same process and set of tools I’ve been using for several years. Who could live without Calibre?!
Liked a tweet by Matt MaldreMatt Maldre (Twitter)
Kathleen did you own the domain where Planned Obsolescence1 was peer-reviewed? It may be one of the first major examples of book-length online academic samizdat of which I’m aware. Perhaps you know of others which could be documented? I suspect we could help provide additional exemplars and links to other web technology, platforms, plugins, etc. to make this an easier and more commonplace practice.

James Shelley, I’ve noticed your draft efforts2,3 as well. I’m curious if you could take a moment to document them, i.e. what you’re using, how you’ve planned it, etc. to help others as well.

If you’ve already blogged about these in the past, then even links to those could be helpful to others using similar publishing practices in the future. Thoughts on brainstorming, best practices, pros/cons, could be highly useful as the landscape changes.

References

1.
Fitzpatrick K. Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy. NYU Press. https://amzn.to/2NAfIPF. Published November 1, 2011. Accessed July 23, 2018.
2.
Shelley J. System Thinker Notebook. James Shelley. http://jamesshelley.com/drafts/simple.html. Published July 11, 2018. Accessed July 23, 2018.
3.
Shelley J. On the Simple Life. James Shelley. http://jamesshelley.com/drafts/simple.html. Published July 22, 2018. Accessed July 23, 2018.

🔖 Pressbooks | Create Books. Print & Ebooks.

Bookmarked Pressbooks :: Book Publishing & Ebook Formatting Software | Create Books. Print & Ebooks. (Pressbooks)
Pressbooks makes it easy to create professionally designed books & ebooks. Discover how our user friendly epublishing software can help you publish today!
This looks like an interesting platform. Saw it as a subdomain on someone’s personal website, so perhaps it’s self-hostable?

👓 Introduce a new way to retain knowledge from Kindle books | Diigo

Read Introduce a new way to retain knowledge from Kindle books by Joel Liu (Diigo)
Diigo provides a 2 step method to help you make the best use of your kindle highlights. Step 1: Import your kindle highlights to your Diigo library. Step 2: Organize highlights from a book in your own knowledge structure.
Another interesting way to potentially cut out data from Amazon Kindle e-books in terms of annotations, marginalia, and notes.

Resilient Web Design

Bookmarked Resilient Web Design by Jeremy Keith (resilientwebdesign.com)
The World Wide Web has been around for long enough now that we can begin to evaluate the twists and turns of its evolution. I wrote this book to highlight some of the approaches to web design that have proven to be resilient. I didn’t do this purely out of historical interest (although I am fascinated by the already rich history of our young industry). In learning from the past, I believe we can better prepare for the future.

You won’t find any code in here to help you build better websites. But you will find ideas and approaches. Ideas are more resilient than code. I’ve tried to combine the most resilient ideas from the history of web design into an approach for building the websites of the future.

I hope you will join me in building a web that lasts; a web that’s resilient.

Moneyball for Book Publishers: A Detailed Look at How We Read

Read Moneyball for Book Publishers: A Detailed Look at How We Read (The New York Times)
A reader analytics company in London wants to use data on our reading habits to transform how publishers acquire, edit and market books.
likes Moneyball for Book Publishers: A Detailed Look at How We Read – The New York Times

readingdata-1050

Free E-Book: Neural Networks and Deep Learning by Michael Nielsen

Bookmarked Neural networks and deep learning (neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com)
Michael A. Nielsen, the author of one of our favorite books on Quantum Computation and Quantum Information, is writing a new book entitled Neural Networks and Deep Learning. He’s been releasing portions of it for free on the internet in draft form every two or three months since 2013. He’s also maintaining an open code repository for the book on GitHub.

Michael A. Nielsen
Michael A. Nielsen