Literature
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Background: In ancient times, there was the “scroll,” which is basically a super inconvenient book where you can’t arbitrarily access information on a particular “page” without some laborious scrolling. Later, the “codex”—or “regular book”—was invented. It’s basically a stack of identically-shaped pieces of paper that are bound together on one side. So far, so good.…
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Background: English has a few options for conveying the tone of speech in a sentence by using different letters (Figure 1): italics or bold emphasize a word, capital letters EXPRESS ENTHUSIASM OR ANGER, and a tiny font indicates that, I don’t know, maybe a mouse is speaking. But that’s about it! There is no specific…
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Background: A book always has an obvious indicator of how far along you are in the story. With a physical book, you can see the remaining pages, while e-book readers display a difficult-to-avoid indicator like “232 pages (67%) remaining.” The Issue: The problem here is that the number of remaining pages conveys a lot of…
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The issue: It’s often hard to get motivated to read a famous work of literature, especially when there are so many other forms of entertainment competing for one’s attention. Proposal: Let’s create a situation so that a person can read a book as a “bonus” along with a primary activity that they were already doing. (Ideally,…
WorstPlans: updated every Monday since July 2014! 