It’s an alpha release, still much untested and rough around the edges, so I’d encourage anyone interested in the topic to play with it and get in touch with questions or feedback or even proposals to collaborate so to make it better.

Why?

These days anyone who’s reading and studying as part of their daily routine is probably doing it via some digital device too. May that be an e-reader like the Kindle, or just the default pdf viewing software that comes with a mac or pc. Digital reading saves lots of time, in many cases, but also makes it very cumbersome to annotate texts and especially keep track of these annotations.

Resquotes.com comes out of this experience: I needed a way to save and organise the important snippets I read and wanted to be able to get back to, sometime in the future, even if I didn’t know when.

This is the same spirit (I assume!) that made Chomsky write these words in one of his latest works:

..reading a book doesn’t just mean turning the pages. It means thinking about it, identifying parts that you want to go back to, asking how to place it in a broader context, pursuing the ideas. There’s no point in reading a book if you let it pass before your eyes and then forget about it ten minutes later. Reading a book is an intellectual exercise, which stimulates thought, questions, imagination.
Noam Chomsky

Likewise, all the hours spent reading PDF files and Kindle books felt to me not as beneficial as they could have been – unless I had a way to collect and get back to the quotes that caught my attention in the first place.

How it works

In a nutshell, ResQuotes currently allows to import text snippets, either from the web or from your Kindle, and use them to create collections of related content via topics and folders.

A topic is like the main gist a quote is about. Topics can (and are supposed to) be reused and provide a basic organising mechanism for the quotes one saves. So, you can have many quotes on the topic of ‘science teaching in the 20th century’, or on ‘information architecture’.

So you can have a Topic page which collects together a bunch of quotes which focus on the same idea or concept.

Quotes and topics can be added to the application in two main ways. Either by filling out a web form…

…or by extracting it directly from your Kindle.

Once you’ve imported a bunch to stuff into the system you will be able to search for it or organize it further using collections.

That allows also to automatically create ‘topic maps’ based on the relatedness and similarity between quotes and topics.

What’s next

Difficult to say what is going to happen next. I’d like to add more import mechanisms, download options, improvements to the way collections are created. But really, I’d like to get more feedback from real users!

So please please please – send me comments if you have any (by the way, next week I’ll be in Oxford (UK) giving a demo of the app at the Force11 conference in Oxford).

Happy reading with resquotes.com!

To be fair, I’ve been intrigued by this topic for a long time, although probably with a much less academic interest than the one many people in the digital humanities community often have. In short, I’d say I care more about designing applications that can change the way people read online, rather than taking on biblical text-encoding enterprises that at the end of the day result in just another, more complicated, html page.

So I was happy to see that there’s lots going on in this area outside academia; in this post (which is a work-in-progress) I’ll start collecting a few examples of this kind of digital tools.

Findings

Findings is a “groundbreaking tool for collecting, sharing and discussing clips you find on your Amazon Kindle and from any website on the internet. Just import your Amazon Kindle Highlights with Findings and you can start sharing and discussing them with others instantly”.

The key idea here seems to be that since a lot of the reading we do nowadays is online (or on digital devices) we may as well start sharing the ‘highlights’ we create by using a social network architecture (e.g. share, vote, comment on etc.). The idea definitely makes sense, and, quite interestingly, it reminds us of what used to be common practice in a time when the book (as we know it nowadays) wasn’t yet an established form of writing (check out Robert Darnton: “early modern Englishmen … broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks“)

Small Demons:

Small Demons. The blurb is catchy: “suppose someone took every meaningful detail from all the books you love. Every song mentioned, every person, every food or place or movie title. And what if they did that for all the books everyone else loves, too. The ones you’ve never heard of. Suddenly you’ve got a whole world of seemingly random people, places and things, all gathered in one place. Together they create something vast, wonderful and entirely new. A Storyverse. A place where details touch, overlap and lead you further. To new music to listen to. New movies to watch. Places to visit. People to know. And of course, new books to read. Getting started is simple. Just choose a book. See where it takes you.”

Here there seems to be some level of semantic annotation of the texts, which produces a thick layer of metadata that can be used to create unusual and interesting interconnections among the materials published. Definitely worth keeping an eye on – in particular I wonder how ‘deep’ is the semantic annotation process, and on which scale!

Readmill

Readmill is a “curious community of readers, sharing and highlighting the books they love. Highlight your favorite passages and share them with your reading community. Follow people you like and find out what your friends are reading. Explore a world of reading and keep a list of books you want to read. Read with Readmill for iPad, and sync highlights from Amazon Kindle with the Readmill Bookmarklet.”

The read-highlight-share idea is the same as in Findings (above); the main difference, at first sight, is that this Berlin-based startup is also producing mobile apps (e.g. iPhone, android) that will make the ‘Readmill experience’ much more integrated and, supposedly, powerful. We”ll see!

Quote.fm

Quote.fm is presented as “the best way to discover, read and share great texts that have the power to convey ideas, provoke emotions or change your entire life. It’s all about texts truly worth reading.”

This is another German company that in the spirit of Findings (above) has put up a service for saving and sharing quotations taken from online resources. The site look is quite appealing, there’s no support for Kindle yet by it appears from the Timeline that soon we’ll see a whole bunch of new features on this site..

Read and Note

Readandnote.com system “has the ability to annotate digital versions of books and many types of different assets, add any asset and the capability of linking references through the annotation process. The e-publication suddenly becomes more than a ‘read-only’ document”.

This technology seems very promising; the website talks about supporting iPad and mobile devices too, which is always a plus. Unfortunately there isn’t any demo or screencast available at the moment, but we’ll keep an eye on this (you can sign up to receive news from them if you like).

UPDATE 1/6/12: a video of the software is now available online.

Tailored Texts

Tailored Texts is a “project which allows lovers of language and literature to collaborate in the reading and annotation of original-language texts that are in the public domain”.

The software is very usable and it offers several fairly advanced features, such as categorised annotations (‘definitions’, ‘grammar’, ‘analysis’ etc.), wikis and integrated discussion boards. It may be tailored especially to language students, teachers and translators who need to study a text and/or annotate it collaboratively, but it seems as if it could be used in a number of other contexts too.

That’s all for now..

Which of the ones above will succeed? I’ll try to keep adding pointers to this list as I run into them in the next weeks, so come back for more.

Tip: the recently finished ifBookThen conference had a lot of interesting talks (also, you can read an overview of it on Storify)

1. Reading on the go: honestly, after sitting down for a while and asking myself WHY ANOTHER GADGET I came to the conclusion that that’s the main reason for wanting a big iphone (so to say). I have lots of pdf’s, and spend a lot of time on trains, planes, etc. so having a portable reading device that integrates well with my lifestyle has long been a desire (almost a necessity, I’d say) for me. Both the Kindle and the iPad support this well enough. So we’re even here.

2. Weight: if you’re carrying around a mobile reader of some sort, you want it to be as light as possible. Here the kindle just wins: 240 g for the Kindle3 WiFi, vs 680 g for the iPad Wifi (the 3G is 50 grams heavier). In a nutshell: the Kindle is amazingly light !!!

3. Battery life: again, do you want a mobile device, or a mobile device + a charger you always have to pack with you + worries about where to recharge its batteries? The Kindle offers 1 month of battery life (officially); more realistically, a bit less I’m tended to think. I can say I already used it for two weeks, reading several hours every day and browsing the internet too (and apparently it takes a few charge cycles for the battery to reach full capacity). So no worries here. The iPad instead, 10 hours or slightly more…. Mmmmm…..

4. Internet: both have WiFi, but the iPad offers a much more compelling experience (colors, interaction etc.). However, when it comes to 3G the Kindle offer a formula that was new to me: after the initial purchase, you won’t spend any money on connectivity. Yes, sounds incredible but true: Amazon pays for Kindle’s 3G wireless connectivity, with no monthly fees or commitments. And this is valid in over 100 countries and territories, . This feature was a winner for me: if I’m on the move, I either want no internet whatsoever (= I’m trying to stay away from work) in which case the iPhone is more than enough; if not, I’d probably take my laptop so that I can both surf the web and do a thousand other work-related things too. Kindle’s 3G support matches well with both situations, so here we go. Kindle won for me here.

4. Simplicity: I spend most of my working hours in front of a computer, then often go home and play/do music using a computer, maybe watch a movie in the evening using a computer. Do I really fancy having another computer? Definitely not. Especially because one of the major virtues of computers, that is, the fact that they are ‘abstract machines’ that can run a possibly infinite range of softwares, turns into a nightmare-feature when it comes to updating these softwares, fixing settings and dealing with a never ending series of other smaller issues that inevitably come up. Having matured some experience with the iPhone, I know already that the iPad will suck up my time this way too. While instead the Kindle is so simple (just a text reader, really) that maintenance is almost non existing. Ergo, Kindle wins here for me..

5. Price: last but definitely not least! It’s just a hundred pounds for the non-wifi Kindle, and a hundred-forty for the wifi one. iPad starts at 499 right?

In conclusion: I guess that the main constraint for me was the fact that I essentially wanted a reading-device for when I’m traveling. All the rest is a pleasant extra, but still, just an extra.
The iPad is very attractive, sleek, powerful etc .. it’s definitely comparable to a laptop if you consider the range of things you can do with it. But if you already have a laptop… well you know my answer now!

Hope this can be of some help to other undecided buyers – cheers!

….