Can you say more about “couldn’t stand the kindle interface for books/notes?”. I’m trying to figure out if I should try this and don’t quite have a model of why it didn’t work for you (and whether that’d translate to me)
couldn’t stand the kindle interface for books/notes
This is in comparison to using Emacs. When using Emacs as my interface for reading books and writing notes,
I can use a familiar UNIX file system to store my books as PDFs and EPUBs. I can easily back it up and interact with my collection using other tools I have (which is a real benefit of using a general purpose computing device). With the Kindle, creating and managing collections (an arbitrary category-based way of organizing your documents) is awkward enough (you need to select one book at a time and add it to a collection) given my experience with the last Kindle Scribe firmware that I just relied on the search bar to search for book titles.
When using Emacs, I can do a full text search of my notes file simply by pressing “s” (a keybind) and then typing a string. In contrast, while the notes written on the Scribe can be exported as PDFs, you don’t have the ability to search your notes. This wasn’t a dealbreaker for me, though, to be clear.
It is a bit hard to point at the things that make me want to use Emacs for it, because a load-bearing element is my desire to do everything in Emacs. Emacs has in-built documentation for its internals and almost every part of it is configurable—which means you can optimize your setup to be exactly as you like it. It feels like an extension of you, eventually.
This also somewhat drives my desire to use a simple and (eventually, given enough investment) understandable operating system that doesn’t shift beneath my feet. And given that both the interface and the operating system of the Kindle Scribe are opaque and (eventually) leaky abstractions, I feel less enthusiastic about investing my efforts into adapting myself to it.
data point: when I got my scribe, I was shocked at how good writing on it felt. It might or might not beat my favorite pen on the best possible paper, but it certainly beat anything less than that. I’ve tried the remarkable, and ipencil-on-ipad and didn’t have this experience. Maybe that’s because the scribe hasn’t seen much use and it will feel worse once it accumulates dirt, but I think Amazon did a really good job with the feel of it.
I also find there’s a difference emotionally between “this note is not optimized for reference and will be a pain in the ass to find later” vs “this note will disappear from history the moment you look away”. Knowing I could find something if I really really needed it frees up my brain from having to retain it.
Based on a focusing-style attempt at understanding why, it seems like there’s a certain sense of pleasure and delight associated with using the Kindle Scribe to write (and read) on, in my mind, and a sense of inelegance and awkwardness associated with writing on paper. Whatever experiences, beliefs, and sense of aesthetics underlies this is probably the driving factor.
I did have access to notebooks and pens and whiteboards when I bought the second Kindle Scribe, but hesitated to use any of them for writing down my thoughts. One thing that comes to mind when I imagine such alternatives is that I fear losing a log of what I thought and wrote, and I didn’t imagine doing so if I wrote it on the Scribe.
Can you say more about “couldn’t stand the kindle interface for books/notes?”. I’m trying to figure out if I should try this and don’t quite have a model of why it didn’t work for you (and whether that’d translate to me)
This is in comparison to using Emacs. When using Emacs as my interface for reading books and writing notes,
I can use a familiar UNIX file system to store my books as PDFs and EPUBs. I can easily back it up and interact with my collection using other tools I have (which is a real benefit of using a general purpose computing device). With the Kindle, creating and managing collections (an arbitrary category-based way of organizing your documents) is awkward enough (you need to select one book at a time and add it to a collection) given my experience with the last Kindle Scribe firmware that I just relied on the search bar to search for book titles.
When using Emacs, I can do a full text search of my notes file simply by pressing “s” (a keybind) and then typing a string. In contrast, while the notes written on the Scribe can be exported as PDFs, you don’t have the ability to search your notes. This wasn’t a dealbreaker for me, though, to be clear.
It is a bit hard to point at the things that make me want to use Emacs for it, because a load-bearing element is my desire to do everything in Emacs. Emacs has in-built documentation for its internals and almost every part of it is configurable—which means you can optimize your setup to be exactly as you like it. It feels like an extension of you, eventually.
This also somewhat drives my desire to use a simple and (eventually, given enough investment) understandable operating system that doesn’t shift beneath my feet. And given that both the interface and the operating system of the Kindle Scribe are opaque and (eventually) leaky abstractions, I feel less enthusiastic about investing my efforts into adapting myself to it.
oh, one question: if you mostly don’t look at your notes afterwards, why do you need a kindle scribe for them instead of a notebook?
data point: when I got my scribe, I was shocked at how good writing on it felt. It might or might not beat my favorite pen on the best possible paper, but it certainly beat anything less than that. I’ve tried the remarkable, and ipencil-on-ipad and didn’t have this experience. Maybe that’s because the scribe hasn’t seen much use and it will feel worse once it accumulates dirt, but I think Amazon did a really good job with the feel of it.
I also find there’s a difference emotionally between “this note is not optimized for reference and will be a pain in the ass to find later” vs “this note will disappear from history the moment you look away”. Knowing I could find something if I really really needed it frees up my brain from having to retain it.
Based on a focusing-style attempt at understanding why, it seems like there’s a certain sense of pleasure and delight associated with using the Kindle Scribe to write (and read) on, in my mind, and a sense of inelegance and awkwardness associated with writing on paper. Whatever experiences, beliefs, and sense of aesthetics underlies this is probably the driving factor.
I did have access to notebooks and pens and whiteboards when I bought the second Kindle Scribe, but hesitated to use any of them for writing down my thoughts. One thing that comes to mind when I imagine such alternatives is that I fear losing a log of what I thought and wrote, and I didn’t imagine doing so if I wrote it on the Scribe.