I’m actually not out of print any more. I just didn’t get around to updating the Un-Store page today! I’ll do it tomorrow. Man. Crazy days for me.

It’s really a new design medium. I need to learn how to work with it before I publish with it.

I hope so!

I know you are out of print right now. But I don’t really use paper books anymore anyway.

I’m glad you offer the rules on PDF, but could you also distribute them in e-book format?

PDF’s are a pain in the butt to read on a Kindle. You need a magnifying glass.

Check out this article to see how you can publish on the iPad for almost no cost:

http://media.venturebeat.com/2010/03/28/self-published-electronic-books-to-make-it-to-apples-ipad/

I’d rather you published with Kindle (as that’s what I have right now), but I’m sure a lot of other people would be interested in getting the rules in different formats as well…

Pop open a div, see the hypertext. Maybe even make main text flow around the new div (the converse of the Talmud method) so you can read both. Scroll within the small new div to read more, and have an embiggen button for when you really want to wander off to read the whole doc, using the back button to return.

Oh, you could have scrolling pull-text! Sidebars only go the length of the screen and scroll separately from the main text. You can pop it open and closed, from a single sentence (designated by style) to minimize screen distraction.

And speaking of distraction, I gotta go work on Human Contact.

Certainly, I wish blogs could do this. I really tire of Rob’s footnotes and want either pop-ups/mouseovers or sidebars lined up with the note.

Conceptualize less disruptive cross-referencing, and let’s talk, because that’s where I’m stuck.

Figuring out how to provide rich content while doing what text does best — provide (surprisingly) nonlinear data — is the challenge here, right?

Text works best, in my opinion, when something requires thought while interacting with it. When watching a video, you have to absorb, rather than consider, unless the director has specifically given you space to do so. When reading, you stop for a moment, consider, go back a paragraph, even jump ahead, all the time.

Illustrations can play a part in that to any degree, but inserting any but the shortest videos suddenly requires you to do a different thing, where looking at an illustration, or even manipulating a 3d model, doesn’t. You can do those things now with PDF, though I don’t think there’s a way to depaginate* PDFs.

Let’s find out!

So, until I read that, I’m going to propose this:

Digital Texts should have inline images and graphics (including manipulable 3d and 2d objects, like 3d illustrations or manipulable graphs), but use of video should be discouraged in favor of nonlinear, explorable information.

Because text legibility relies on column width, the default format should be vertical, but non-vertical texts should absolutely be possible — comics, for instance, or large visualizations. Scott McCloud has gone into this quite a bit.

So, when we start like this, what does the format look like?

Or is this not where it should be going? Let us discuss!

* Heh. I just had to teach spellcheck “depaginate”. I suspect I’m going to be using it much more in the future.

I am reminded of the line from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. When Ford Prefect asks why the Golgafrinchans are arguing over economic policy rather than doing something practical like inventing the wheel, the marketing girl’s retort is, “Well, if you’re so smart, you tell me what *color* it should be!”

I think a lot of this early epub stuff is worrying about what color our new wheel should be, rather than realizing rolling along’s not good enough any more…

Funny how we’re now faced with a new set of concerns with digital publications. To a degree, medium *is* the message, so we have to (re)address these concerns in order to move forward again.

Of course we do. That’s what happens when you change media. The concern is that, by adhering to standards that come from a different medium, we’re making this current one *worse*.

We’re not reinventing the wheel in toto, but it does feel like we’re constantly tinkering with part of it.

But that’s like saying that the pneumatic tire is reinventing the wheel. This is a real change of medium, and pulp-colored pages are training wheels.