Tagged: htext
E-books in the Academy
I was moved to comment on E-books in the Academy — A Story of Limitations and Affordances
There's some good thinking by Ted Nelson (known for coining the word 'hypertext'), online and in his book Literary Machines on the required affordances for intellectual work. Doug Englebarts ideas for augmenting human intellect are relevant. Both hark back to an Atlantic article by Vannevar Bush called "As We May Think". All of this work is decades old– but well worth looking at before setting off to reinvent the flat tyre.
ePub, used by a most ebook readers (but not the kindle, unfortunately), is an open standard based on web standards. There's really not a large number of competing formats. DRM is more of an issue in preventing the reading of epubs on multiple devices.
Using the floor for piles of paper is just an interface problem– getting a useable map for what you want to keep in mind, suited to the size of displays you're using. The notion that computers should recreate paper (word processors, PDF, wysiwyg), with all it's limitations, has held these developments back.
You're correct that so far annotation support is relatively poor. Bush and Nelson's ideas are much richer. Keeping annotations with the file, as when marking up PDFs is a mistake– I require a searchable web of my own annotations and those of others with whom I've agreed to share. The annotations need to point back to a permantly available version of the text I annotated– but subsequent revisions of that text should also be available. My annotations should be first class citizens of this textual web– able to be read and annotated again in turn. And so on. much of this flies against the notion of the fixed book, and some is hampered by the unbrilliant design of the web itself (we can't afford links to things we care about to change).
I don't see the interests of publishers as at all important. The whole issue of who pays who for what set of limited rights just gets in the way of sharing ideas. Nelson has some ideas about micropayments here, rewarding authors based on usage. Publishers are destined to be service providers, not owners of the rights to texts created by other people.
Tags: htext
