A personal version of the book

[rlanzafame]

This Discussion may have some overlap with Discussion 7.

Many students want to use the online book like a real book, for example: highlighting, comments, bookmarks, etc. Some of them actually downloaded the markdown files, copy/pasted into an online AI tool and asked it to convert to LaTeX, which required additional work (of course some features were missing).

Some students printed the book, but more students appear to prefer making PDF's and annotating them in an app on a tablet (e.g., GoodReader or Notability on iPad).

One approach is to allow students to see the source code and do what they like with the files, but that does not help students who can't work with text-based files and open source software tools. We could try to provide a few features or tools for doing something with the source code ourselves (for example a "local" book combined with an offline HTML-based annotation tool?).

An online tool like Hypothesis, but personalized would be nice. I think students will want to keep their annotations private.

Helping students to download the HTML build files in a constructive way could be the best option, as it would avoid them having to build the book, and leaves the possibility open to have comments made online or locally. One can even imagine that it can help identify updates in the book for students (e.g., a "diff" of sorts between two build folders).

Another option is to provide a complete PDF version of the book, but formatting is a challenge. A poorly formatted PDF is acceptable, but then loses the link to the online book for updates. Perhaps we don't need to provide a "complete" PDF book, but can provide static versions of certain chapters? Then getting updates would only consist of finding individual files.

For now, it would be great to have someone research a list of annotation tools that can work with HTML to see what is already out there...

[Tom-van-Woudenberg]

I think a student-controlled Hypothesis, so not the one activated by us in the config file, gives students the flexibility to annotate the book and not be surprised by comments from other people because they deliberately set up Hypothesis. They can setup their own private group in that case.
Any tools which export the book have a two disadvantages: no updates and no interactive features.

[Tom-van-Woudenberg]

Hypothesis can also be used for personal annotations. See:

• the Chrome extension here (I did not try the Safari or Firefox Bookmarklet)
• a test i made on this "old" book (last year) without Hypothesis enabled. I made one public and one private post.

Yeah, I like the extension (in contrast to standardly enabling it in the book)

[Tom-van-Woudenberg]

i agree about the export, as far as a direct link goes: but i think there are ways to manage the export such that it can allow for updates and interactive features.

• For updates: maybe there is a diff-like tool for comparing HTML? With some
• For interactive part, using teachbooks package to fire up a python server. It could also be used to make the comparisons.

Ah I see, this sounds like something which requires quite some development, but I see the potential
('simple' alternative: we learn students how to do jupyter-book build book after cloning the source repo?

[Tom-van-Woudenberg]

https://web.hypothes.is/help/how-do-i-report-abuse/ seems like they go to Hypothesis themselves, that doesn't seem to be our intention of moderation

[rlanzafame]

yeah, makes sense. see other discussion for links/screenshots.

[rlanzafame]

i think asking students to build the book could work for a small number of students (unless it's a programming or computer course), so we still need a universal option. the "works with existing HTML" option would be compatible with this approach, though