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Comment by cstross | Hacker News Reader

(Wearing my jobbing-novelist hat here ...)

He kinda lost me at the idea of navigating a WIP using page thumbnails on the left. (a) That's so 1988 (Clive Sinclair, I'm thinking of you and your Pipedream here), and (b) the page is not the appropriate document element for navigation — scenes can be as short as a sentence or almost as long as a chapter, and scenes are how I structure prose fiction. Indeed, a manuscript page bears no real relationship to a published paper book page, or an ebook equivalent.

Finally, as functional requirements go this is, shall we say, less than ideal: but let's not go there.

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Totally agree.

Check out Granthika, a semantic novel editor with automatic error checking for timeline and character errors: http://granthika.co

In progress, pre-beta, by a friend and novelist.

> a completely unprecedented, patent-pending technology

I'm all for innovation which is why I stopped reading here.

Agreed; "patented" or "patent-pending" is better read as "immediately stop reading this, cast the entire concept out of your mind, and don't ever think about this general problem-domain again, or we might be able to sue you or your employer if you compete with us by inventing exactly the 'wrong' algorithm/concept/thing/etc. And certainly avoid reading our patent, or we can definitely sue you for competing with us.".

While it looks cool, this seems to be the equivalent of swatting a fly with a humvee.

Depends on the task. It's made to automate continuity for long novels, complex fiction/fan fic universes and complex investigative journalism.

So the one thing that makes the idea of caring about pages interesting is it gives you control of the reading experience. Making sure you manage certain things (for example, ensuring you put a hook on every page to keep the reader asking questions) is interesting.

However I would personally think that should just be a secondary view available when doing a late pass going over a book, not a normal way to see things while writing.

I'm not totally convinced. Our brains are designed for perceiving a physical, spatial world, and pages provide standardised physical chunks of a reasonable granularity. I think that's useful. You can know that a certain scene was about 5 pages back. You know roughly how much further forwards 20 pages of text is.

Personally speaking, I find the lack of relationship between manuscript "pages" and published pages a more solvable problem than it ever has been historically. WYSIWYG visual editors for different ebook and print formats and page dimensions would at least give a working approximation for those who wish to self publish and exercise some degree of QC over the eventual reading experience.

My wild theory is that the reading experience, or RX if you will permit my being cute, is going to become An Official Thing in the ebook era, especially as authors play with the different narrative structures theoretically unleashed by the medium.

Totally agree with your comment about the scene as the atomic unit of the novel, however. Or at least the molecular unit, if you consider the beat to be the atom.

I'm not sure what a page even means anymore. There are some works that may only be available electronically, especially if they are on the shorter side. In that case the page size would be dependent on the Kindle or phone model, etc.

I read ebooks on my phone. While I could use page-like navigation, I find it more comfortable to just scroll down to keep the text I'm currently reading in roughly the same screen area. The only concept of a page that's left in that situation is the transition between chapters.

It was already dependent on print edition, which varies over time and territory. E-books just emphasize the meaninglessness of page numbers.

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