Andy Matuschak
patreon
Demo: an early look at BookBridge
🕑 Added 2023-12-22 20:28:23 +0000 UTCThere's a funny trouble in my work: I've been doing all these experiments around augmenting the reading experience with dynamic media. But, as it happens, I hate doing serious reading on screens! Most readers I interview feel the same way, to varying degrees.
Derrek Chow and I have been experimenting with bringing the digital into physical reading experiences, and the physical into digital reading experiences. This talk briefly summarizes one branch we've been exploring. There's lots more to be said about the design principles which have emerged in this project, but it's still early days—more as the work develops.
Happy holidays, all! I don't think I can really say it enough: I'm so, so grateful to you all for the opportunity to do the work that I do. Thank you for your support.
Comments
Reet Chowdhary
Wow!! This looks amazing. The problem resonates deeply
Andy Matuschak
That really resonates! Thank you for the suggestion. :)
Daniel Steinbock
Love this exploration and how far you've taken it! The embodied cognition of reading a physical book is under-appreciated. When I'm searching back for something I read, I may not remember at all which page or chapter it was, but I often remember where it was in my field of view (left/right page, how far up/down). Memory is so context-sensitive, I could see value in including a little more context in the timeslice view, e.g. time of day, location, slightly wider FoV to see the reader's environment. Imagine the complete timeslice record for a textbook you read in many sessions and locations over the course of a semester, or a book you read in many sessions and locations during a vacation, or a book you pick up intermittently over years. The little frame of environment in the recorded image — a library desk, a cafe table, your lap, a beach blanket — may play an unexpectedly outsized role in your embodied recall of the material, as it could link up with your sequential memories of surrounding life events and the things that were on your mind that day/week/year. In decoding my old marginalia, I often wish I could be refreshed on the state of my intellectual life when I wrote it, to breathe the original sense & vitality back into it.
