I love reading books, but I enjoy incremental reading too much to read books, blog entries, etc. in the linear fashion they were intended to be consumed. The negative aspects of linear reading will be covered in another post soon. Until then, to make it easier to read books using Supermemo, I have found this to be particularly helpful:
There are many sites that allow you to create text documents of .epub and .mobi files. Here is one that I have been using: Whoosh.
Right now I am reading at least 10 books (Two of which are fiction), and I have thoroughly enjoyed this way of reading. If you haven't tried it, it is a very fun way to read scientific and historical books (Which is what I enjoy reading the most).
To summarize:
-Incremental reading is superior and more fun than traditional reading.
-Convert an acquired epub or mobi file into .txt.
-Only copy 10-15 pages of text at a time to prevent slowing Supermemo down.
NOTE REGARDING FORMATTING ISSUES: I'm not sure if you are encountering formatting issues with this blog, but I am. When I view this post on an RSS feed, the text is white against a white blackground, meaning I cannot read the post. It is a mild annoyance to say the least. Tell me if you are unable to view what is posted here. If it is too big of a problem, I'll try to change the settings for the blog. Otherwise, I'll try to make due with what I've got here.
ReplyDeleteHi, I can't see any text in this post. Only by viewing the page source I could read it. And I wonder, what do you mean by "text that has no value to me"? You could cut out parts that might be of interest, no? Or do you kinda fast-read over the 10 pages and then deceide which parts contain junk?
ReplyDeleteSorry about the formatting, I reposted it again (I had problems viewing it in Google Reader because the text was white, and Google Reader's background is white...).
ReplyDeleteI tried to answer your question in a post that I just now put up, hopefully it helps answer your question. I'm working on another post that articulates how I break an article down from Time magazine as an example. That should be up in a few days.
So, if you only add 10-15 pages at a time, after all you do linear reading of the book, and the incrementalism enters in processing the extracts, is that the case?
ReplyDeleteHello! Since this article was written more than 10 years ago, I have kind of changed how I do incremental reading. What I do now is read a book on my iPhone or iPad, copy and paste important paragraphs into my Notes app and once a day I add those Notes into SuperMemo as a topic. Those topics eventually surface after I do my Items and they are converted into flashcards within a week or so. Right now I am working on an external incremental reading system that I use for my iPhone or iPad (I LOVE IR but I HATE that I can only do it inside of SuperMemo on Windows, I want to do IR when I’m standing in line or commuting). I think my system works, but I want to give it a few more weeks before I publish it. I don’t want to publish what has worked for a week or two, but for at least a couple of months.
ReplyDeleteThat being said, if I did all of my IR on SuperMemo itself, I would probably do the same thing. Copy and paste big chunks of a book into SuperMemo, read them, make extracts as I go along, and once I finish the big chunk I copy-pasted, copy and paste another big chunk of the book. I just don’t want to overload SuperMemo with large text documents, I’m just weary of the “scaffolding” of SuperMemo, don’t want anything to crash. Let me know if you have any more questions on previous posts. I’m finishing up a book about my experiences with SuperMemo, I might publish the entire book and then break it into a bunch of blog posts. I want to make an audio version so those that like to listen to audio books can listen to it.
Thanks for the quick answer. I am brand new in SuperMemo (less than 2 months) and tried Incremental Reading before using RemNote's plugin by James, but am now trying SuperMemo to a full experience. Heard about you watching Guillem's videos and imported your whole blog to SuperMemo, and I am processing it incrementally lol. I know this is an old post, but I am trying to find my way in IR; large topics in SM are not a good idea; I tried splitting long articles and books, but in many books not having the first reading made linearly (shufflying everything) did not look a good idea to me. I tend to prefer the processing you mentioned: firstly reading almost linearly and then incrementally processing the extracts). Thanks for your clarifications. And I am eager to see this system of yours being released, as well as your book. I'll certainly read it!
DeleteNo problem! Yeah, hit me up with any questions you have. As far as processing long articles or books, something else I’ve done is make each chapter its own topic in SuperMemo and then dismiss the topics I’m not reading. So the book has maybe 10 chapters, so each chapter gets its own topic in SuperMemo, but the one I’m reading is the only one that is “active”, the rest are dismissed. What I love so much about IR is that you can read a paragraph or two, then say “see you tomorrow.” I’m not sure if it’s best practice, but I like to read one paragraph at a time, then delete the paragraph as I read it. Instead of thinking in terms of pages or long “marathons” of reading, I like to think in terms of just paragraphs and subheadings. If I just focus on that, it’s easy to make quite a bit of progress without thinking about it. What I would love would be to have a voice read me the paragraphs one at a time, then I delete them as I don’t find anything worth remembering in the paragraphs. This kind of gets into what I want with a non-SuperMemo Incremental Reading system that syncs across all of your devices, I’m still working those details out.
DeleteIncremental Reading took me a lot of time to “get.” When you learn to trust the system and reschedule important books or articles to be read (For me it was mostly the next day), you get into this really awesome ‘flow state’ of zapping from one article to another, making items here and there, deleting topics as they are completed, making new topics out of ideas you get while reading, it’s such a cool feeling. But it took me a really long time to use it properly and to get hooked on it.