ReadMill

Laura Miller has a new article about a reading app -- ReadMill -- biting the dust: http://www.salon.com/2014/04/16/is_reading_anti_social/

https://readmill.com/

It appears that it's a sort of shared annotation / quote application, which reminds me that Tim used to talk about annotations here. Which would still be one of my most-wanted apps to go with LT.

Anyway, I just thought I'd post here about Readmill, and see if anybody else uses it or has used it, or has thoughts.

I tried it, but like the article posts, I am an anti-social reader. I have no need to share quotes or favorite passages, and no need to read books together with friends or connections. I enjoy sharing reviews here, but I hardly participate in book discussions either (book clubs or virtual book clubs are not for me either). I read for me and don't feel the need to 'get more' out of my reading by discussion.
I enjoy the discovery of new books through reviews or announcements on blogs and here on some topics, but I'd hardly consider that 'social reading'.

I, on the other hand, would be very happy to do social reading. I take lots of notes and don't have a great way of organizing them -- I just put them in my personal wiki (sort of my electronic commonplace book) but I would really love to share them. I hadn't even known about ReadMill, but honestly it would have been hard to adapt it anyway. We should have it for LT!

I also have loads of notes for everything I read, but only a fraction makes it into my reviews. I'd love to have a place for it on LT, with some of it public and some just for me.

Didn't know about ReadMill, I wouldn't use an app but would use the equivalent functionality here on LT. At the moment, the tattered pages either are thrown out after writing my review, or sit in awkward piles around my house. (Eventually to be thrown out, but I can't do that immediately, it's just too sad.)

I thought Readmill had potential and I used it a bit. I didn't know anyone else who used it so glad I didn't invest too much time in it now that it is closing down. I liked that you could harvest your notes from kindle books from the http://kindle.amazon.com site and then share with others who may never look at the kindle page. It was also easier then retyping quotes.

However, in LT there is the quotations section in common knowledge. I don't know if I'm using it correctly or not. I have put "interesting quotations" in that box, which the box caption says is a valid entry. However, there's no share facility so it's just a reference for me. It'd be great if it there was a share link/button to post to social media, or even a "post to talk" option, to start or add to a thread in your chosen group based on that quote.

Also, I'd love to be able to sort by CK:quotes in Your books. Also, someway to show only my quotes.

One thing I like about the Kindle site is the daily review feature. It shows you books from your reading history where you've highlighted sections or written notes, or shows popular highlights, nice way to jog the memory esp useful for non-fiction.

No, I think LT needs to do this. LT actually started—as an idea—with an annotation tracker. (But first I'd need to catalog the books.) Give me another 10 programmers and I'll have it by next month :)

Harvesting notes from Kindle is a great resource: don't have a Kindle but am somewhat surprised Amazon supports that.

Ooh, I love that you could load up your kindle annotations! I have kobo annotations & bookmarks and it's annoying to not be able to pull them OUT of the book.

Tim ... given that you can't have an additional 10 programmers, and you must have your own priority list of Things To Do, ... what's in the hopper? could you share some thoughts?

Yeah. I don't see that happening. I don't think they're exportable, are they?

They likely used some sort of bookmarklet to get them from the page. I checked a few months ago and they weren't directly exportable. In fact, my particular annotations weren't directly scrapable with a bookmarklet either because they didn't show the whole quote. That may have changed since then though.

Ah...seems that we could probably get them from here: https://kindle.amazon.com/your_highlights
It has infinite scroll, but we could work through that.

Tease.

I really think annotations / marginalia would be the killer app -- especially if tied into their kindle/nook/kobo/ereaders.

If you ever saw the sheer volume of post it notes and flags in some of my books you would understand how much I would love a feature such as this.

I know, but https://kindle.amazon.com/your_highlights is a page you need to be logged into. A company tried that--alowing people to give them their passwords so the app could fetch data. Amazon smoked them.

Is the issue that the company would have access to (a) passwords and (b) the data, in addition to the users?

I ask because clearly my bank gets my passwords from utilities and other creditors so I can pay my bills online, get my electronic bills, and that's okay. Wonder if there's any approach that would be okay, and still allow LTers to link our data from Kindle to our data in the LT catalogue.

With a bookmarklet there wouldn't be that issue, but clearly that's not the best way to accomplish the task.

>17 elenchus:

Amazon is worried about the commercial stuff no doubt—people could abuse that data. But it also favors their competitive position. If a program could suck down your data and move it elsewhere, well, you'd be less tied to the Kindle.

I can see that it would be useful to have a tool that lets you pull your ebook annotations out of the proprietary space of the bookseller, but I'm also inclined to agree with the author of the Salon article that sharing annotations is only likely to be interesting for the classroom. (Unless you're a distinguished writer who will one day have a biographer trying to retrace your creative process.) When you open a secondhand book and find that some unknown student has underlined the passages they were going to quote in their essay and translated the "hard words" incorrectly in the margin, it doesn't really add to your enjoyment of the book, and the first thing you do is normally check how far it continues (rarely more than chapter one, in my experience).

Well, it's also about platform lock-in. If I am a constant note-taker then I don't want to be locked in to a proprietary platform for keeping those notes. I'd rather them be available to me on any platform I choose (even away from a platform). We could provide that sort of freedom.

>7 timspalding: glad it's on the wishlist! Wish I could find you those 10 programmers.

>9 lquilter: I like kobo's annotation function, but it's only social connection is through facebook, only a tiny proportion of facebook & kobo users could make use of it. You'd have to use facebook, connect it with Kobo, have facebook friends who use kobo, and read the same books, and want to talk about the books.

>11 conceptDawg: yes, readmill used a bookmarklet, worked well.

>20 thorold: i want annotation sharing personally to make books more social and more of a conversation, for fiction, but also to learn and expand on my non-fiction reading. For my work, I work in an academic library, our organisation only teaches via corrospendance and online. So professionally I can see huge potential for opening up books and ebooks for distance learning and teaching. That was readmill's goal, to have a universal place to share annotations, so sad it's shut. But good to hear so much positive feeling towards the idea in this thread.

>20 thorold: I wish whoever marks up the library books I borrow had stopped after the first chapter.

>21 conceptDawg: Yes, I agree completely about getting away from platform lock-in. That (and the fact that I don't have a Facebook account) is a main reason I never bothered with the annotation features on Kobo.

>22 wifilibrarian: Sorry I wasn't clear: educational use is the one "social" use of annotation sharing that clearly does make a lot of sense. I've studied with the Open University (in the days when it was all snail mail) and it would have been a real bonus to be able to share annotations with other students and your tutor when you're all studying the same book for the same course. (But only in a limited group: if you're reading Hard Times for a graduate seminar on the industrial novel you don't necessarily want to see the notes made by German high school students reading it for an English language course.)

>23 MarthaJeanne:
I suspect that people who give a course up before the end are most likely to sell their course texts (or give them to charity shops). People who annotate library books are either deranged or Joe Orton.

>24 thorold: I agree for formal education social annotations need to be quite granular, down to the class level.

I guess we'll have to disagree regarding personal use of social annotations. There's a lot about book cataloging sites like this one that probably don't make sense to those not on them, and areas within the site that are niche. I still want to be able to share my, and read others', annotations. Or at least have better ways to collect them for my own use. There's a skeleton of it in CK:quotations, that could be expanded, those who don't want to use could ignore it.

I make annotations in a lot of books; I would probably want to selectively make those annotations publicly available -- some books I would make the annotations available to the world; other books I would make the annotations available to a specific user or set of friends. Ideally!

I'd add that in addition to many of the uses for annotation already identified, I'd also simply like to have a central place for my own use, not only for books I own but especially for those I borrow or discard. In some cases, I'd like to opt to share those annotations in some way. In other cases, I'd like to review upon a future re-read of the book. And still others, just my compulsion for organizing my notes, perhaps distill further in a review and so forth.

Worth noting: I'd like the feature to support editing of those annotations. I assumed that would be the case, but it wasn't stated explicitly. Having a read-only image of my annotations is certainly better than nothing, but not what I had in mind!

I wish there was some way of turning that bit of iBooks off permanently.

I've been reading this, with interest, since the "sharing" of annotations I might make was the very FIRST thing I changed on my Kindle. I had no interest, at all, in what others thought of something I was reading at the time, and found it extraordinarily annoying. Of course, the intellectual achievements of those making the notes varied (as you'd expect). However, I buy less and less Kindle books, and have mostly returned to paper.

I'm trying to fathom how annotations would work here. It seems as though it could start serious arguments if stored in CK; then again, outside of disambiguation notices and birth/death dates, I'm not sure of how much of CK I pay attention to.

If not in CK, how would it work? I'd rather it was something I had to actively seek out, rather than something hard to avoid (since I'd be more likely to avoid it). I'm currently reading multiple translations of the Rubaiyat, and making notes, but it's unlikely that I'd put them here when I'm through.

Oh, and people that write in library books should suffer penalties I'm too polite to describe. I still have punch cards (from the dawn of time), and they are easily the most useful bookmarks/note cards ever devised. They're thin enough that even twenty in a book doesn't disturb the page, and there's all that surface front (if blanks) and back that can be used for notes.

So? Where would annotations go? Would they be like descriptions, off to the side, and you can select them if you'd like, or ignore them? That doesn't seem all that useful, to those that are desiring this feature. It's an interesting problem.