dom-distiller VS literal

The one ask you have that Literal doesn't yet support is read mode for sources (though it will automatically archive / backup sources). It looks like Chrome's read mode (i.e. the "Show simplified view" toolbar) is open source, so I think I could add support relatively quickly if you're interested.

Literal (version 1.1.31-foss): Capture annotations, sources, and knowledge from text that you read.

I've recently come across Literal which makes me share notes or annotations which I want to save for later. It has tag functions too. Maybe this can help.

There's been some good writing on the general failure of "Hypertext books" (e.g. the first couple of paragraphs here [0]). I personally think this stems from some of the reasons that underlie some of those that you outline - books published on the web simultaneously try to be skeuomorphic in retaining the physical book metaphor (organized linearly, mostly static and plain text, etc), while still losing some of the real-world effects of the physical medium (being able to intuitively understand progress, markup, etc). The way that we publish and read text actually hasn't changed much, even though the target medium has of course changed dramatically, and as a result you end up with arguably the worst of both worlds. E-readers try to side step the problem by extending the book metaphor even further, but text on the web doesn't have that privilege.

I'm working on a product, Literal [1], that aims to solve some of your specific problems, specifically providing for a way to annotate and add notes to web content and enabling some degree of source management. My ambition is to move on to solve some of the other problems you raise as well. If you have an Android device and are interested in trying it out, I'd love to connect!

[0] https://subpixel.space/entries/open-transclude/

[1] https://literal.io/

Along these lines, I'm building an annotation management system, Literal, that fulfills some of your asks, specifically around collecting and annotating articles. It also does source management, and has a tagging system that would let you set up "to read" and "have read" lists. It doesn't yet do audio annotation but that's definitely on my list of things to add. It's Android only at the moment but I'd love to connect with you (or anyone else) that is interested in trying it out.

Thanks! I created an issue to track your idea of making tags more visually distinctive. The app right now is very weighted towards information capture, and I'm actively working on improving organization functionality so I think this idea goes right in with that theme.

Open source (github) and natively implements the W3C Web Annotation Data Model, meaning your data is safe and portable.