Writebook<br /> Instantly publish your own books on the web for free, no publisher required.
ᔥ[[Evan Hildreth]] in Downloaded 37Signals’ Writebook at 2024-07-04 (accessed:: 2024-07-04 08:29 AM)
Downloaded 37Signals’ Writebook because free. I might try to run it locally as a Scrivener replacement, but I’m bristling at the thought of running a full Rails app on the server for what should be static files.
Codeberg is a collaboration platform providing Git hosting and services for free and open source software, content and projects.
A collaborative online editor
Let’s look at some of the attributes of the memex. Your machine is a library not a publication device. You have copies of documents is there that you control directly, that you can annotate, change, add links to, summarize, and this is because the memex is a tool to think with, not a tool to publish with.
Alan Jacobs argues that the Memex is not a tool to publish with and is thus fundamentally different from the World Wide Web.
Did Vannevar Bush suggest the Memex for writing or potentially publishing? [Open question to check] Would it have been presumed to have been for publishing if he suggests that it was for annotating, changing, linking and summarizing? Aren't these actions tantamount to publishing, even if they're just for oneself?
Wouldn't academics have built the one functionality in as a precursor to the other?
“A tool to think with, not a tool to publish with” — this seems to me essential. I feel that I spend a lot of time trying to think with tools meant for publishing.
Which tools for thought and tools for publishing overlap? Which diverge?
Overlap: Obsidian<br /> card indexes<br /> Microsoft Excel
Publishing Only<br /> Microsoft word
Thinking Only: <br /> ...
Today, you either thrive on that word processor model or you don’t. I really don’t, which is why I’ve invested effort, as you have, in researching previous writing workflows, older than the all-conquering PC of the late 1980s and early 90s. At the same time, new writing tools are challenging the established Microsoft way, but in doing so are drawing attention to the fact that each app locks the user into a particular set of assumptions about the drafting and publishing process.
via u/atomicnotes at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/149knhj/comment/jobi9ro/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 on 2023-06-15
https://www.benji.dog/articles/sparkles/
Quarto® is an open-source scientific and technical publishing system built on Pandoc
surveys indicate that screens and e-readers interfere with two other important aspects of navigating texts: serendipity and a sense of control.
Based on surveys, readers indicate that two important parts of textual navigation are sense of control and serendipity.
http://books.google.com/books/about/Electronic_journal_literature.html?id=YSFlAAAAMAAJ
How does the control over a book frame how we read? What does "power over" a book look like compared to "power with"?
What are the tools for thought affordances that paper books provide over digital books and vice versa?
I find myself thinking about people publishing books in index card/zettelkasten formats. Perhaps Scott Scheper could do this with his antinet book presented in a linear format, but done in index cards with his numbers, links, etc. as well as his actual cards for his index so that readers could also see the power of the system by holding it in their hands and playing with it.
https://readlists.jim-nielsen.com/
<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Jim Nielsen</span> in (Re)Introducing Readlists (<time class='dt-published'>03/25/2022 23:09:14</time>)</cite></small>
https://bookmarks.reviews/
Medium, a writing app that is also a publishing platform and a social-media network, represents the logical extreme of this vertical integration.
Julian Lucas indicates that tools like Microsoft Word, WordStar, WordPerfect, and Google Docs, are writing tools which ultimately result into the vertical integration of Medium. The mistake here is that while they are certain tools and one can write into them and use them for editing, they are all probably best thought of as tools in the chain of moving toward publishing with Medium being the example that allows one to present their work as well as a distribution mechanism with a cheery on top.
What she is not focusing enough (any?) attention on is the creation processes at the start. How does one come up with an interesting idea? How does one do the research? How does one collect ideas moving toward some teleological endpoint? Tools that address these ideas of invention and creation are the real writing tools that writers so elusively search out.
Far better to look at note taking tools or tools like Hypothes.is that go to the roots of the creation process. Tools that can take fleeting ideas and collect them. Tools that can take those collections and interlink them. Tools that allow for combinatorial juxtaposition and rearrangement. Tools that allow outlining.
It is only after this that one may use a tool like Microsoft Word to do the final arrangement, editing, and polish before sending it off to a publisher.
In Bound to Read, Jeffrey Todd Knight excavates this culture of compilation—of binding and mixing texts, authors, and genres into single volumes—and sheds light on a practice that not only was pervasive but also defined the period's very ways of writing and thinking.
WeasyPrint is a smart solution helping web developers to create PDF documents. It turns simple HTML pages into gorgeous:
Tool mentioned in IndieWeb chat. Could be used to turn a site into a physical book.
But you know what? Screw it. I need to take my time and develop the necessary ideas properly. If these thoughts never develop in such a way that I can turn them into a book, so be it. If they do so develop and nobody wants to publish it, so be it. (I’ll just make various digital versions.) The point, at this stage in my career, after fifteen published books, is not the publication, it’s the thinking. So let the thinking, in public, commence.
Some interesting thoughts about thinking and writing in public.
An uncomplicated XML vocabulary for authors of research articles, textbooks, and monographs. The best of DocBook, LaTeX, and HTML. Outputs: print, PDF, web, EPUB, Jupyter Notebooks, … (Before June 2017, PreTeXt was called “MathBook XML”, so many of those references remain.)
A tool mentioned by Alex Enkerli at I Annotate 2021.
Think of it as a spectrum. Things we dump into private WhatsApp group chats, DMs, and cavalier Tweet threads are part of our chaos streams - a continuous flow of high noise / low signal ideas. On the other end we have highly performative and cultivated artefacts like published books that you prune and tend for years.Gardening sits in the middle. It's the perfect balance of chaos and cultivation.
There's something here that's reminiscent of Craig Mod's essay Post Artifact Books and Publishing.
Reminder to self: revisit this idea.
One of the flaws of using Digital Mappa for projects like this appears to be that it acts more as a viewer (as a result of it's original use with maps) than as something for text. As a result, when looking at various pages, the URL of the page and it's attendant resources doesn't change, so one can't link to particular resources within the work, nor can one easily use digital tools (Hypothes.is for example), to anchor and annotate portions of the text.
This is a facsimile and diplomatic edition of Codex Vercellensis CXVII, Archivio e Biblioteca Capitolare di Vercelli.
An interesting example of a digitized version of a book.
Interesting to see this actually hosted by GitHub pages.