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Re:Show HN: Please belittle and insult my free online notes ... by AznHisoka on Friday June 01, 2012 @11:21AM (#4053871)
What problem or pain does it solve? How does it improve the quality of my life? Why should I care?
Re:Show HN: Please belittle and insult my free online notes ... by BenoitEssiambre on Friday June 01, 2012 @11:49AM (#4054066)
This is another common question I get. Let me try to answer it again (I need the practice).

For readers:

-Optimizes learning of complex concepts.

-Books are like web pages with links that open inline. This prevents readers from having to manage dozens of browser tabs. This often happens to me, for example, when browsing wikipedia.

-Makes books available on more devices than native apps.

-Features such as word highlighting, starring etc.

For content creators

-books can easily include inline sections from other bookvoid books. The author's job becomes part authoring part curation and it saves him or her from writing suff that has already been written.

It is all based on optimal principles of hierarchical information organisation. In my view, there are very fundament ontological principles, rooted in mathematics and philosophy, that make this kind of hierarchical linking of concepts optimal to human reasoning.

I see it as solving some of the problems that wikis have by providing the enforcement of hierarchy, the inclusion of different levels of details about subjects in a single text and the ability to maintain a chain of trust on material. Anyone can't edit everything like in wikis. If your own books is not popular, you have to have been curated-in by more popular author to gain visibility. You can't simply insert yourself in a popular page like in wikis.

edit: formatting

Re:Show HN: Please belittle and insult my free online notes ... by shimsham on Friday June 01, 2012 @03:56PM (#4055404)
That was too wordy.
Re:Show HN: Please belittle and insult my free online notes ... by Morg on Friday June 01, 2012 @11:27AM (#4053918)
Exactly, take the problem / solution, reduce it to 5 words tops and it'll make a standard short intro that people think is cool these days.

From what I can gather it's about a platform to make readable content more accessible, more dynamic, in an attempt to provide a nice reading/learning experience much like wikipedia clicking for half an hour, but on more serious topics and in a friendlier fashion that allows you to easily go back to the article/topic you were reading one thought step before.

That's still too long, but summarizing the idea made it way more appealing to me so it might be a direction.

Re:Show HN: Please belittle and insult my free online notes ... by BenoitEssiambre on Friday June 01, 2012 @11:54AM (#4054088)
Thanks. This helps :-)