Piotr Wozkniak, the author of Supermemo, and something of a guru in the SR community, already had this idea, he calls it Incremental Reading, and he has refined it quite a lot. I've played with it, and I think it probably is useful if you intend to learn large amounts of material at once, but I ground to a halt because I'd filled my reader with material I wasn't particularly interested in learning.
Supermemo supports incremental reading qutie well, and there is an Anki plugin which is just about usable (although it could use some work).
I am aware of incremental reading, but I didn't know there was an anki plugin for it. Thanks for the info. This isn't quite the same thing, though, because incremental reading is still about turning things into question-answer pairs, whereas this technique is about passively reading or skimming through text.
Spaced repetition systems use math to determine the optimal way to study things. This post is about an idea I've been trying for a few months for improving SRS for some subjects.
SRSs usually use a pretty rigid system of asking questions and demanding answers. I think that for many subjects it's not very important to know specific answers, either because such answers can be looked up easily or because the gist of a subject is more important. So here's an idea: add an ebook to a spaced repetition system and read/skim each chapter or page when it's due for review. This can be used for ebooks, physical books, or articles from the internet or elsewhere.
For books or ebooks, there are two ways to do this: either add each page as an individual card (with an image of the page right on the card) or create a card for each section or chapter. The latter technique can be used for non-electronic books. If each page is its own card, you can review things more quickly because you don't have to open an ebook or book each time you review, but you'll need to convert the ebook to images first. You can also add annotations, either by editing page images, typing notes onto pages' cards, or adding annotations with your ebook-reading software.
One way to convert ebooks to images is to use imagemagick. On Linux,
Change the density if images are too small or too large. You'll have to convert ebooks to pdf format first. This command creates all the pages as imgname-1.png, imgname-2.png, etc. Move the images into a .media folder where your other anki decks are. Use a script to make a card for each page. For example, using python:
You probably want to review cards in the order they were created (so that you'll review due cards by page number). This option doesn't exist in anki, so you'll need to make each book a separate deck and use the patch command to apply this diff to /usr/share/anki/anki/deck.py, or wherever that file is on your computer:
Also, for each deck, go Settings->Advanced->Initial button intervals and set them so there's no randomness.
Pros of this technique:
Cons of this technique
Thoughts?