Log of concerts I’ve attended.

★ ★ ★ = Wanna see them again!

★ ★ = Worth seeing

★ = Ok

☆ = Disappointing

On the surface, this is an ordinary blog. For its techno-literary lean, it could be categorized with the likes of robinsloan.com, craigmod.com, sive.rs, jsomers.net, and macwright.com. My goal, however, is not just to publish my thoughts on subjects that interest me but to promote

of #reading and #writing. I attempt to do this not only through the ideas I discuss on site but also through the custom features I build into its interface, which allow readers to explore the content on this site according to their curiosity:

I use GitHub Issues to track problems and potential improvements.

I started developing this site in February 2023. The fundamental unit of this site is a post. What you’re reading right now is a post. I often call them “pieces,” too. I write each post as a Markdown text file using a text editor, usually VS Code and occasionally vim. From those text files, Jekyll generates the site’s HTML and CSS using the Minima layout theme and the Solarized color palette. I have tweaked fonts, spacing, and other UI details by modifying the _sass/minima/_layout.scss file. The features described in the table above are implemented using Ruby plugins and Liquid.

The site is static and consists mostly of HTML and CSS and a little bit of JavaScript. It’s hosted for free on GitHub Pages. The only money I’ve spent so far was on the domain okjuan.me, which I bought in June 2023 from bookmyname.com for ten years for €156 and configured okjuan.github.io to point to it.

To publish a post, I commit it to the main branch of vbook GitHub repo. I configured that repo to publish on GitHub Pages as okjuan.github.io/vbook, which gets resolved by DNS to okjuan.me/vbook. GitHub provides a default process for building Jekyll sites and publishing them to the web, but I use the community-built Jekyll Deploy Action because I have several custom plugins and GitHub only supports a few select plugins.

I wrote an essay called The Virtual Book but I never defined the term. By virtual book I mean a book unbound by the traditional and physical constraints of printed books. Even though I think the greatest possibilities await in the virtual world of computers, I don’t think virtual books need to be digital. The possibilities that excite me challenge not only the physicality of books but also their intangible attributes.

A virtual book can be multimedia. It can consist of words, images, video, audio. There, we got the obvious one out of the way.

A virtual book can be readerdriven. Instead of forcing readers to follow the author’s thought process, a virtual book can let each reader steer the way. Wikipedia does this already. It lets you search the page for keywords, skip to the section you’re interested in, and even escape into a tangential topic, never to return. This is a natural way to consume Wikipedia because its form affords it.

Books generally have one start and one ending, but a virtual book can be nonlinear. Wikipedia is again the obvious example. But letting the reader drive is only one way to create a nonlinear book. It’s also possible to create multiple entrypoints, or even multiple endings, like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.

A virtual book can be dynamic. It can change after its initial creation. Printed books, on the other hand, are static snapshots laboriously rendered by a particular author at a particular time. But what if a theory is debunked? Or a hypothesis confirmed? Or a record shattered? Or, in the case of storytelling, what if a loose end can be tied up neatly?

A virtual book can be nonmonolithic. It does not need to be discrete or selfcontained. It can consist of many interconnected parts that make up the whole but can exist without it. It can reference other virtual books, borrow bits from them, and lend bits of its own. For example, if Herbie Hancock’s memoir was a virtual audiobook, it could allow its snippets to be reconstrued into a documentary about jazz. (If Ken Burns’ Jazz documentary series was also ‘virtualized’, it could have been updated 15 years after its release to include bits of Herbie’s narration.) In fact, it could provide material for documentaries about many different topics: jazz, funk, hip hop, Miles Davis, Black Nationalism, Nichiren Buddhism, meditation, and crack addictions, to name some of the obvious ones.

A virtual book can be responsive. What if a reader could expect a book to field spontaneous questions? ChatGPT is an obvious candidate here, but the possibility is broader. What if Herbie Hancock returned to his memoir every now and then to answer questions that readers had left behind while reading it? What if readers could raise flags on issues that factcheckers would then verify or return to the author for amendment?

The possibilities are plenty, and they are thrilling. The difficulty in realizating them is not technological, but legal and political. Powerful companies – and therefore governments – are hugely incentivized to prevent the free exchange of “intellectual property”. To make virtual books possible, we need not only the technological power of software, but also its progressive politics.