Reading things “the old way”

So, though a long adventure that doesn’t make a good story (it starts with an oil change!), I ended up at a coffee shop reading the New York Times and later at a library reading a book about the history of the Soviet Union. I don’t read things on paper that much, and I found it surprisingly frustrating. I think this had to do with two things:
- Lack of hypertext.
- Unavailability of a search engine to cross-reference things.

So, the first one basically means that reading an article on paper doesn’t have any links in it. So, when I’m reading a[n] NYT article and notice a side topic that interests me, I can’t follow a link to learn more about that topic. I just need to keep reading the article that interests me less, or switch to something else. Worse yet, I don’t have a really good way to find more about a topic from the coffee shop anyway, even though there might even be articles in that issues of the NYT that might be related. Of course, smart layout can be used to combat this, but the core of the argument still stands. If I want to learn more about something there, I need to remember it unless I steal the newspaper from the guy who lent it to me. Not surprisingly, I forgot what topics these were.

When reading the book on Soviet history, I ran into a similar problem. Certain passages or terms that were especially interesting couldn’t easily be researched. I mean, I was at the library, but searching for things at the library seems like a task better fit for big topics, like certain movements in the revolution, but not minor ones only covered for a paragraph in the whole book. For that you need something with huge recall, like the internet and a search engine. Additionally, I wanted to know more about the author in order to understand where he was coming from (I don’t remember the name of the book or author now), but I couldn’t find a really easy way to do that.

Now, I don’t typically sit around paging through a book looking up all sorts of things, but these two materials I read this morning happened to lend themselves to that. The book I’m reading in my free time now does this to a lesser extent, since it’s still nonfiction and somewhat narrative. I’ve looked up topics from the book on a few occasions so far.

Anyway, I think that’s all I’ll write about that for now. Hopefully I’ll be over my fever and cold tomorrow so I can go to work.