Editing Hacks

[reading: Tom Stafford & Matt Webb, "Mind Hacks"]

Started reading "Mind Hacks", which looked interesting in the bookshop but the formatting is already starting to annoy me. In that respect, it's the worst book-that's-just-a-printout-of-a-cool-website ever, and that's up against some pretty stiff competition.

• A large fraction of the hacks refer the reader off to movie files or Flash animations on the web. Not very helpful for a physical book that you might want to read on a train.
• "Color: The second color is used to indicate a cross-reference within the text". Except that there is no second color—the relevant parts just come out in a hard-to-read light gray.
• The halftoning for photographs and some of the diagrams is poor—it looks like the output of an 1980's laserprinter.
• I don't know what system they used to produce the book, but it's generated some real oddities in linebreaking (mostly around URLs). Favourite so far: a line break after the decimal point in "3.3" (page 144).

Still, the content might be OK once I get into it, and at least they include lots of references to the original literature.

[25-Nov-06] Edited to clarify that I'm complaining about the formatting rather than the content. Feeling slightly guilty given that one of the authors came over and commented. You'd think I'd have learnt my lesson about who finds what on tha intarweb.

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