Category: Books

The Problem with Digital Reading is Paper – LiquidText

The Problem with Digital Reading is Paper – LiquidText

A lot of people over thirty-five tend to think they prefer paper books/documents because they’re old. They may see digital as being better in some abstract way and, with a tone somewhere between apology and lament, see themselves as too old to get on board. The beauty of Rosenwald’s piece is that it helps us all get a little closer to the root of the problem with digital reading. The signs are that it’s less of an incompatibility with our childhood habits, as with our psychological and cognitive requirements as people.

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Kindle is really designed for casual reading; the place where digital has fallen short, as Rosenwald explains, is with things like digital textbooks. And while Rosenwald focuses on academic reading, other studies have shown similar preferences among professional knowledge workers, about 80% of whom like to print their documents to read them. This kind of professional and academic reading usually involves what academics call “active reading” since it necessitates a more proactive engagement with a text, and especially the physical medium of a text. Taking notes, comparisons, writing excerpts, searching, are all examples.

So why is active reading so hard on digital devices? Partly it’s the nature of a digital device that invites distraction and, on tablets and PCs, the irritating lighting of an emissive display. But a major component is more about what the devices are capable of and how that matches to what people need when they read. Back in the 90s Kenton O’Hara studied what goes into the active reading process at Xerox’s research labs in the UK. He found many of the usual suspects: annotation like highlighting and margin notes, bookmarking, etc. But he found nuances that are less obvious—having good ways to retrieve notes, support for non-linear reading, viewing different document sections in parallel, diagramming, etc.

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Think about it—many of the best attributes of paper require it being composed of physical pages. So we’re left in a difficult spot: our digital active reading products are inspired by paper, inherit its problems, and avoid its advantages.

Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer – review | Books | The Guardian

Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer – review | Books | The Guardian

Scientific accounts of the world offer us a user’s manual – a description of how we interact with the world. They say nothing whatsoever about the way the world really works – what vision scientist Donald Hoffman in 1998 dubbed “the relational realm”: “We might hope that the theories of science will converge to a true theory of the relational realm. This is the hope of scientific realism. But it’s a hope as yet unrealised, and a hope that cannot be proved true.”

There is a better way to read on the internet, and I have found it – Vox

There is a better way to read on the internet, and I have found it – Vox

Aesthetically, I prefer print to most digital text. The Kindle’s screen is crap at displaying photographs or charts, and while its e-ink text is easier on the eyes than an iPad, it’s harder on the eyes than a book. The gap only grows when it comes to reading most articles online: Magazines are still laid out with a care and thoughtfulness that even the best digital publishers can’t touch (except Vox, of course).

And yet I do virtually all my reading digitally, and for a simple reason: My memory is terrible. I forget 90 percent of what I read about 90 minutes after I read it. The Kindle’s highlights and notes are invaluable to me: I can find any passage that caught my eye, or any thought I cared enough to write down, anywhere that I happen to have an internet connection. Similarly, I use the online storage system Evernote to save passages or full articles I happen across online and may want to refer back to.

These storage solutions make everything I read more useful to me after I read it. My library goes from being inaccessible to being a sprawling digital memory. But both storage solutions are, to be honest, terrible. Amazon’s Kindle site feels like it was built in 2001: It stores your highlights and notes in the least useful ways possible, its search function is garbage, its user interface seems designed to frustrate, and it is extremely, exceptionally slow. Evernote’s text clipper is better, but it doesn’t work on my phone, which is where I end up doing a lot of my reading.

But all that’s in the past. I have figured out how to read online, and it is glorious.

In this, I am indebted to Diana Kimball, who developed this system for “a decent digital commonplace book system.”

Making Kindle highlights useable with Clippings.io and Evernote

It begins with Kindle. Clippings.io will export your Kindle notes and highlights in usable, searchable form — and then plug them directly into Evernote, so they’re available whenever you need them, and sortable in every way you might imagine. The difference here is profound: My Kindle highlights have gone from being available if I can remember what book they’re in to discoverable if I can simply remember any word from the highlight.

In practice, this means my relationship with highlighted passages and notes has gone from one in which I have to find them to one in which they can unexpectedly, wonderfully find me. A search for, say, “filibuster” will call up highlights and notes I wasn’t specifically looking for, and that I had actually forgotten, but that help with whatever I’m working on — and that sometimes prove to be the thing I should have been looking for in the first place.

Using Instapaper premium and Evernote to save article snippets

A lot of what I read, however, isn’t books. It’s news articles, blog posts, magazine features. I’ve long wanted a cleaner way to save the best ideas, facts, and quotes I come across. Now I have one.

Instapaper — which lets you save any article you find online and read it later on any device you choose — recently added a highlight function. The free version limits the number of highlights you can have to some absurdly low number. But if you pay for the premium service — $29.99 a year — it unlocks unlimited highlights.

That’s helpful, but there’s not much you can do with the highlights on Instapaper. But Kimball created an If That Then This recipe that automatically exports Instapaper highlights into Evernote. So now anything I highlight in an article — at least an article on Instapaper — is saved into the same searchable, sortable space that my book highlights inhabit. So basically anything I read in any digital format can be highlighted, and those highlights can be saved and searched. It’s wonderful.

The halting genius of science-fiction writer Ted Chiang – The California Sunday Magazine

The halting genius of science-fiction writer Ted Chiang – The California Sunday Magazine

“Sometimes, people who read my work tell me, ‘I like it, but it’s not really science fiction, is it?’” he says. “And I always feel like, no, actually, my work is exactly science fiction.”

After Star Wars forever made the genre synonymous with what Chiang calls “adventure stories dressed up with lasers,” people forgot that science fiction includes the word “science” for a reason: It is supposed to be largely about exploring the boundaries of knowledge, he says. “All the things I do in my work — engaging in thought experiments, investigating philosophical questions — those are all things that science fiction does.”

How to Understand Your Computer – The New Yorker

via How to Understand Your Computer – The New Yorker.

Early on in the book, Chandra makes a very interesting claim: many programmers and I.T. professionals have no real idea how computers work, either. Because they don’t need to, essentially; they need to make them perform specific tasks, but they don’t need to understand how they perform them.

He quotes a plaintive post by a programmer named Rob P. on the Q. & A. site stackexchange.com. Rob begins by saying that he is almost embarrassed to reveal what he’s about to reveal, given that he has a degree in computer science and has worked full time as a developer for five years. “But I Don’t Know How Computers Work!” he says. “I know there are components … the power supply, the motherboard, ram, CPU, etc … and I get the ‘general idea’ of what they do. But I really don’t understand how you go from a line of code like Console.Readline() in .NET (or Java or C++) and have it actually do stuff.”

Chandra goes on to provide a fairly thorough explanation of how computers work—of the things that are physically caused to happen by these coded commands, the “mediating dialect between human and machine.” He devotes an entire chapter early in the book to the language of logic that is the native tongue of computer processors; this is the torrent of binary numbers, of ones and zeros, that constitutes the universal grammar of machines. Chandra even goes so far as to include diagrams, as well as photographs of functioning logic gates constructed from Legos.

Ray Bradbury on Writing, Emotion vs. Intelligence, and the Core of Creativity | Brain Pickings

Ray Bradbury on Writing, Emotion vs. Intelligence, and the Core of Creativity | Brain Pickings.

If I’m anything at all, I’m not really a science-fiction writer — I’m a writer of fairy tales and modern myths about technology.