Comment by eviks
3 days ago
Of course it's not, you can't fit all the words in a book on index cards, you can't fit all the appearances of a given character in a story, all the memorable highlights- all trivially done at scale in a digital book. You can't jump from the index at the end to the required 5 pages where this term appears at the speed of a click
And then your highlights also can't unstick because there is some dirt that ruined the stickiness of a note. And your carefully prepared unsticky bookmarks (you didn't have sticky notes around, so you've followed your advice and improvised) can't all fall out just because your book fell with its back up
I'm not claiming that physical books have all the properties of digital ones, or vice versa.
But there are reasonable affordances to a practical extent within both formats.
I have a large print collection, and a much larger digital one, presently largely on an Onyx BOOX ebook reader. I'm well acquainted with the capabilities and limitations on both systems.
(I've discussed the BOOX device fairly extensively in previous HN comments for those interested.)
Reasonable affordance is fine, that's not what I was arguing against (nor you), but the obvious downside of flipping pages: it's not "very quick, easy" (especially in those huge dictionaries!)
That's where tabbed thumb cuts / index notches are useful:
<https://cool.culturalheritage.org/don/dt/dt3508.html>
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thumb_index>
Image: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thumb_index#/media/File:Blacks...>
Those may be cut in, or self-applied as with index tabs:
The entire notion of a tabbed interface in the computer sense derives from index tabs:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)>
2 replies →