I find reading, especially reading technical exposition, is frustrating because there are so many ways it could be made better in this age of computers. This post will suggest some of the improvements that could be made. I hope dozens of people are already working hard on these ideas. If not, then get busy! These ideas are based on the following assumptions, which I think could reasonably be realized in the next few years. Indeed, most of them already exist in some form. Amazon’s Kindle has some of these properties. The idea is to be able to read text in the same comfortable way we read a book, but with the ability to do other things, some of them problematical, that I will talk about here. Links and searching Searching and links are widely used now and I think they are the best thing since sliced bread. One of the sites that makes the best use of links is Wikipedia, and some of the news blogs do a pretty good job too. In these Modern Times it is annoying to have to read a dead old pack of paper (dopop, pronounce “dope-op”) instead of an interactive book that better fits the habits of us grasshoppers. Technical books are the most annoying, but even novels sometime make a reference to a character not mentioned for awhile or to some obscure rock group, and it would be great to stop right there and find out more about them. (By the way, in Ancient Times – 1980 – mystery novelists had a Rule that no two main characters in a novel would have names starting with the same letter. This is no longer true. Why?) It would be straightforward to provide the ability to search the book you are reading, as well as to mark some phrase and search the internet for it. On the other hand, links in general have to be supplied by the author or at least by someone familiar with the ideas in the text. That is labor intensive. A Wikipedia-like solution to this problem would be to allow other people to add links either freely or under editorial control. (“Read Hamlet, with links provided by the Helsingborg University History Department” – or “with links provided by Linkopedia”.) Wikipedia itself seems to have people who spend some time adding links to its own articles, and I think in some cases they even have robots to do it. For example, most years in recorded history have an article devoted to it, and a mention of a year in some other article seems to quickly acquire a link to the article about that year. Every piece of text should be obtainable and most of them should be free One of my practices in writing abstractmath.org is to provide links that are mostly to electronic texts. (There are a couple of lists of dopops here and there in it.) That is because most younger people and many older ones have the following characteristics: I have been frustrated many times by clicking on a link to a math or linguistics article only to discover that I have to Pay Money to read it. This happens even though Case Western Reserve University (where I am professor emeritus) makes many journals free for downloading. I have notices that this situation is worse in math education and in philosophy than it is in math; indeed many researchers in those fields don’t post their papers on their own websites (many others do). This is not the way Modern Scientific Research should be run! This problem does not have an easy solution and I am not clever enough to propose one. I am aware that some universities as well as Google are working on this, but it will be a long time coming. People who do research or expository writing should be paid for what they do, but I don’t know how to arrange it so that some poor young person named Ramanujan can look up the latest research on Eisenstein series and pay only an anna for it. I have more to say, but it must wait until a later post.
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I am more infuriated by my inability to annotate/hide what I am reading. My eyes are tired of trying to skip text faster. I can’t digest large volumes in one pass; but multiple passes guarantee that I re-read the easy parts as many times as the hard parts.
I’d be willing to drop large amounts of cash for a product that did these two things right.
-K
I’m skeptical that adding links to every document is a good idea. I’m one of those people who will start reading an article, then wander down the first hyperlink– eventually I end up taking a shallow walk through a large tree. Sometimes this is amusing, but when I’m trying to *learn* something, it is frustrating. Linearly structured documents have the advantage of forcing you to focus on one subject.
While we’re on the topic, I’d like to see a browser that deals with hyperlink navigation appropriately. It seems like a natural and useful feature to allow users to see their navigation history, say for the one session, as a tree. Instead of opening a bunch of tabs that flatten the tree, we could open just a couple and anchor them at the right nodes, then move up and down through the tree in a more fluid fashion. I’d love to see a system like this implemented.