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In response to: âBooks vs Internetâ by Sandra at Idiomdrottning
Even if you're looking at âthe good partsâ of the internet, I feel like there's one key difference between a book and a website: books go into much more detail and depth. Like, you *can* make a website with a book's level of detail and depth, but even in the historical style of personal sites on personal interests it'd be rather rare to see that; while with books it's the norm.
I've never written a book but when doing longer-form writing it is pretty refreshing to be able to go into depth and explain literally every single detail and nuance of what you're discussing. Or even just getting to elaborate on related topics rather than having to stay perfectly directly focused for the sake of brevity. Versus even in a blog post, you often feel somewhat pressured to stay concise to what you're writing about; or at the very least it's more âthrowawayâ so you're not necessarily putting all of your efforts into exploring every detail of it. Not that all books are thoroughly in depth or all online blog posts are lacking in depth lol, many many many counterexamples both ways.
For fiction it's obviously different, you should preferably write to whatever length fits the story properly and allows it to work how you want. Still, I think my last point about books incentivizing more writing and editing effort is tangible. There's often a big difference between a fiction bookâor, say, a longer-form fanfiction onlineâand a one-page short story. Again, there are many counterexamples (many authors' sharpest writing is brought out in short stories, for example).
And of course, when you get out of âthe best partsâ of the internet and into social media and real-time chats and such, then you get to very one-sided comparisons. âWhy have nuance and middle ground when I can demand everyone be a member of one of two extreme groups?â Sandra covered that in pretty good detail in their post.
P.S. I've noticed with in-depth online resources, even if they're firmly in the digital domain and aren't just a print book transcribed digitally, it seems very typical to structure them and refer to them as âbooksâ rather than just âweb pagesâ. Perhaps that's just a reflection of the word book having the cultural meaning of a somewhat necessarily in-depth resource.
P.P.S. I completely missed the point of Sandra's original post and responded to a minor subpoint⊠Here's my reply to her email:
Oh shoot, I got that from your post but decided to respond to the other point rather than what is in hindsight your main pointâŠ
When talking about things being collaboratively created versus having a single set of authors, I dunno, I think it depends on the topic. For example, the Dwarf Fortress Wiki definitely could not be written by one person. Seems like a weird example but it's a good one because it goes into incredible technical depth on basically every topic in the game, aggregates all the bugs related to a topic, etc. I doubt even Tarn and Zach Adams could've written it themselves.
But conversely, something like Crafting Interpreters (just the first thing that came to mind) probably would not be improved by having it be collaboratively created.
I guess it really depends. I think superficially I'd say reference material/documentation and/or summaries of a very diverse set of content would be improved by being collaboratively created; but tutorials or guidebooks would perhaps be better done with a single author since they benefit much more from having a strongly-defined structure and having the writing style of a single author (collaborative stuff tends to metasticize into dry technical writing since there's so many authors, no individual's writing style remains in the document).
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