Comments on: EP Meta: Chapter Seven

By: Mark

Mark — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 06:02:57 +0000

I tend to agree with Ian. I’ve tried to read this as a book, but frankly haven’t really succeeded. Instead, I’ve read it sort of as a blog post, which is mostly piecemeal and scatterbrained. Even the individual entries are a bit longer than my blog-post attention limit, so I’ve tended to skim, reading more closely in places that seem particularly interesting, even randomly starting to read partly through a post and only reading some (not particularly well selected) segment of it. Sometimes if it turns out to be really in line with my interests I’ll go back and read the whole chapter start to finish, but it feels like a conscious effort to do so, in a way that sitting for an hour with a book doesn’t.

That said, the online peer review is a great idea, and certainly better than only getting feedback from a handful of reviewers prior to publication. Perhaps an ideal distributed/public peer review would be a standing offer to mail physical copies of a draft book to anyone on the internet who asks to review it, but there are some practical reasons that isn’t likely to happen. So this seems like the next best option. There are probably some formatting improvements that could be made, but I haven’t made up my mind about what they’d be sufficiently to offer suggestions. A set of per-chapter PDFs people could print out to read/markup offline and then post about later might be one option.

By: noah

noah — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 05:20:19 +0000

Chris, I don’t think anyone involved in the EP project has any illusions about what happens after text goes online. We all know that online text moves around in many forms, mostly determined by what people have time and interest to do with it. Of course (that said) I’m guessing people might object if the text ended up in a form that, say, charged money or included advertising…

By: noah

noah — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 05:15:38 +0000

I’m glad you’re enjoying reading EP this way, and I appreciate the kind words.

I hope you don’t mind if I suggest you to MIT Press as someone who might blurb the book :-)

By: Chris Lewis

Chris Lewis — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 21:02:11 +0000

Yeah, Ian is right. Roll on e-print. I am half considering writing a script to roll through all the EP topics and dump them into a PDF document, although I am sure MIT Press might not be too pleased.

I like to use a pen with arrows and comments, and do it in bed! It just isn’t the same doing it slyly at work ;)

By: Richard Evans

Richard Evans — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 19:14:48 +0000

I’m really enjoying reading EP online.

It feels good to read one chunk each day. Because each chunk is quite manageable, it encourages re-reading.

Ian is right that reading on-screen just isn’t the same as reading physical paper.

I really like your book so far. It is very thoughtful, and often insightful.