Try it! I predict, however, that you'll get bored because of the mass of material and won't consistently do the reviews. When I first started making flashcards, I too ignored the "minimum information principle" (from http://www.supermemo.com/articles/20rules.htm). However, experience has taught me to value it. Also, after reading a given page, how would you say whether or not you needed to do it again again? That seems impossible unless the piece of information you're querying is very small.
How would you add Godel, Escher, Bach to an SRS in question-answer format?
While reading the book, highlight key sentences in the text that summarize main ideas. Then use cloze deletion on (the main ideas from) those sentences. You could also try to spice in some specific questions that probe your understanding of a particular key idea, although those would be more challenging to make.
These might be useful to me, as I read GEB about 3.5 years ago and now forget much of it. So if you do this, please consider posting your flashcards for others to use.
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?