Michael, if you write the 11th edition in Tinderbox, you must do something very similar to what the original poster aims to do. I will have to (quite comprehensively) update a textbook on German politics in the next time. This will be a lot of work, and I would be very grateful if you could outline your approach to such updating in a post (or a video).
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Mark, nice job in elucidating a key point: the ability to move atomic notes around.
As @MartinBoycott-Brown points Srivener does a greatly great job with this. Tinderbox, in recent past release can also do something similar:
You can select multiple notes, edit them and move them around.
As you note, the user flow is a bit different, but it accomplishes a similar goal.
What you did not touch on was Tinderbox attributes and action code, which Scrivener does not have. Honestly, I think this is the game-changer.
Finally, Tinderbox export templates, IMPO, are WAY easier to navigate and use. There is a lot more flexibility with them.
Again, as you note, we all gravitate to the tools that help us get the job done. This has been a nice thread to highlight some key differences in a couple of tools.
Not an if, I’m doing it right now. 
Drafts are due tomorrow. Lots of work on my plate, but hopefully, in the next few weeks, I can touch on a few key points.
Michael
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May I take the opportunity to thank the several forum members who reviewed my request for assistance in working out a software strategy for a major manuscript revision. Most grateful for so many useful ideas. The TBX forum is a treasure.
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It is fascinating what this forum is capable of throwing up as a “side benefit” of a discussion.
What you have written vaguely reminds me of the concept of distributed cognition, as outlined in Hutchins’ article “How a cockpit remembers its speeds”: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1207/s15516709cog1903_1
My memories of the topic are hazy now, as it is a dozen years since I have looked at it, but it represents a shift away from concentrating on the individual, which has been so prevalent in psychology and psychotherapy. I treasure the (perhaps apocryphal) story of some psychologists who went to the Pacific islands and tried to give intelligence tests to the islanders. They went off and filled them in as a group, because they had no conception of intelligence as being an individual characteristic. For them, a problem was something that was approached as a group.
A bit like this forum, perhaps. 
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Great article reference. Do you have a reference for this one?
In addressing the OP’s questions:
- primary consideration given to just how complicated it might prove to pour the source document into your working app.
- next, it depends on how you like to work; what format you like to see your content in, how practical it proves to navigate the “working document”, insert your edits, and also how you prefer to review these edits.
- Lastly, in what format is your output document required to be?
Other thoughts -
It’s important to be continuously aware of just how much your document is morphing from its input state and required output state. Sketching out a little roadmap first is useful.
Do you need a particular feature of an app, or is it expendable? You may prefer working with Attributes and switching between Text and Preview panes. Or you may simply be satisfied with auto-highlighting inserted sections - which an app like Scrivener should do for you.
Tinderbox really shines when you find your original data is veering off in a different direction. Flexibility in manipulation comes at the cost of import/export obstacles. All depends on just how much architecting you are up to.
Either way, I’d get a base document setup in whichever “forever” app works best and make that your master doc (another argument in favour of Tbx from my POV), for future-proofing. That would provide you the added benefit of a permanent current ready-to-output version.
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Another contingent factor here, of which @archurhh’sfinal paragraph reminds me is the ‘one app for everything’ fallacy to which we are all prone. Doing a thought-through process in more than one tool )each tool appropriate for its task) is not a failure or necessarily less efficient in the round.
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Yes, but there is “one tool to rule them all,” and that is Tinderbox. All joking aside, I use about about 9 tools and several languages/syntax (HTML, CSS, RegEx, Markdown) and utilities in my work on an ever-present basis: Tinderbox, Obsidian, Text Expander, Zotero, pandoc, DEVONthink, Snagit, ChatGPT, BBEdit, MS Word-YUCK!). Tinderbox is the hub that ties everything together.
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Hi Michael,
Sadly I don’t have a reference for that story. It was told to me by my PhD supervisor, Simon Watts (now at UEA), a reliable source of information! I suspect it might be that kind of story that bounces around between people until nobody can remember precisely where it came from. But I’ve always remembered it as a corrective to the western view that everything is about the individual. This is a topic that is dealt with in an article I have mentioned before, Nisbett et al (2001), Culture and systems of thought.
Cheers, Martin
In that context, and an implicit sense of the ability to share ongoing work, whilst Tinderbox is not a multi-user app (it was never designed as such) it does have very rich/capable HTML export. Thus, work in progress can be shared easily† via web output.
HTML output is also not read/write (sadly Emberlight‡ never got built out). However, being able to see current work doesn’t necessitate also having full read/write access. Even in a group, someone still has to drive the final edit.
†. In comparison to many apps where export options are limited, export from Tinderbox actually is easy. However, it is learning how to configure the export where one does need some time/expertise, so not so easy in that narrow context—at least for the new/novice user. Despite that, the community forum has shown regularly that it can backfill such knowledge for those with an urgent need. As Tinderbox is a toolbox, I see no conflict in the same right toll for right task applying to export as it does to internal structure. A button/wizard driven approach get limiting real fast and is often the reason people end up using a tool like Tinderbox…
‡. I helped work on it at the time. Sadly, IP conflict with Nate’s employment at the time nixed a rather interesting experiment.
I’ve come to this thread late but as this is exactly what I am doing at the moment, I will add a couple of points and echo others that people have made already. It is invaluable having the entire book in one file, to make it easy to move stuff back and forth. One problem with Word processors is that when you put the whole book into a single file, everything slows down, possibly to the point of being unusable, and so you end up with having each chapter in a separate file, something I find hopeless. Load a very long manuscript into Word and it spends ages formatting it, even before you have started. An enormous manuscript is no problem at all with Scrivener, which combines the convenience of having everything in a single document with the advantages of having it broken into as many separate pieces of text as you like. I am working with a book manuscript that was well over 1,000 pages and Scrivener handles it with no problem at all. It is trivially easy to split or merge individual pieces of text. Of course, Tinderbox is fast too.
Bookends is excellent and integrates very well with Scrivener (and it can be got to work with TB too, of course), but my advice is that whether you should use it depends on what revisions you are doing. My current project used a reference manager from the start, and using Bookends is an immense time saver. If the reference is open in BE, two keystrokes and the referecne is in Scrivener. I would not want to work without it. However, in a book I revised a year or so ago, I was working with a manuscript extracted from a PDF of the first edition that the publisher sent me, in which references in their final form, and I decided there were not enough additional references to make the investment of time to put everything in BE worthwhile.
Potentially, Tinderbox offers more tools for exploring links between ideas but in my opinion (and I say this as a MUCH less knowledgeable user than others who have replied) Tinderbox has a steeper learning curve. I would guess that with Scrivener you could be up and running organizing your material in an afternoon though (and some may correct me) with Tinderbox it would take a bit longer. (It may take a bit longer to fine tune how Scrivener formats the file when you “compile” it, but that can easily be done later on.) Whether TB gives enough value added to make it worth learning probably depends on the complexity of the links you are going to make between pieces of text, and how much you will use its ability to create multiple attributes and links.
One disadvantage of Scrivener is that although you can use “Revision modes” to mark different vintages of text in different colours, unlike Word, it does not keep a record of text that has been deleted. You can save snapshots of your document whenever you like, and that can be very useful to make sure you lose nothing, but this is not the same as seeing deleted material struck through in your text.
Good luck!
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Great comments. The learning curve is in the eye of the beholder. For instance, in the past I had a horrible time with the Scrivener exporting. I just could not figure it out. I probably could today, given what I learned from Tinderbox.
I agree that Scrivener is amazing, but it does fall short in the ability to link, associate, and auto-generate insights based on one’s analysis and work, and so many other areas that I’ve restored on in the past. That is why I’ve stopped using it.
Also, people talk about the “steep learning” curve of Tinderbox. I’ve also talked about this before, but it is worth repeating.
- It is more than learning about the tool
For me, the learning Tinderbox was and is less about learning the tool and more about rewiring my brain and looking at the world differently—to see it through the lens of attributes, automatization, transclusion, and metacognition (going deep in to understand my internal processes). I’ve learned to embrace incremental formalization and to let the tool automate what it can, to embrace friction where needed, and to really “think,” possible for the first time in my life.
What I’ve found is that I first needed to (re)learn how to:
- think clearly (ne easy task)
- fight the 3Cs: conformance, comfort, and convenience (be vulnerable)
- define my problem
- embrace a stepped approach
- embrace new languages and syntax (HTML, CSS, RegEx, etc.)
- adopt a suite of tools, Tinderbox being just one
- recognized how effort now gives grace to my future self and others (e.g., I’m orders of magnitude more efficient now, but this was not the case when I was building my templates or action code in the pase. This morning I co-wrote a script with @mwra that will save me days of work!!! Again, the effort had very little to do with Tinderbox and the code, it was all about embracing these 6 points).
So, again, Tinderbox and this community have been less about learning a tool and more about myself: what I’m capable of and how to give back. The whole experience has been truly transformative. With absolute conviction, I would be in a much darker place without Tinderbox and this community.
- Learning Tinderbox
Once you embrace point 1—a never-ending process—learning Tinderbox is actually straightforward.
I’ve put in years to navigate the process above. Now that I have, I have found ways to teach Tinderbox, to teach people in minutes, days, and weeks what took me days, weeks, and years to learn.
Yes. The decision should depend on how much one thinks one will use multiple attributes and the opportunities that provides. I am contemplating thinking of a couple of new projects: one one of them I feel I know how I want to organise the material (the structure follows from the argument I want to make) and I doubt I will use TB (and that was the case when I was rewriting an old book, trying to update it but retaining much of the original) but for the other there are so many potential stands to bring together that I anticipate TB being much more useful.
I’m reminded of one think pertinent for those who have both Scrivener and Tinderbox: Tinderbox can read Scrivener v2 files (but not, I think v3 ones—see here†). The reverse is not true, though I don’t note that as a qualitative judgement, just a fact. Tinderbox does have built-in templates for export to Scrivener (OPML by any other name). Such interchange doesn’t capture all the nuances but might help someone at an early stage of the work who wanted to ‘move house’ from one app to the other.
Amen, and a reminder that working in final print-rendered form is not productive for anything that may need subsequent revision. Be it Bookends or one of the number of other RM apps, having references captured in data form repays. Failure to do so, creates the case above where objective judgment dictates doing it all the hard way is less effort in the round, even if also less pleasant to do. If your work in whole/part needs to cross between different publishing styles, then using an RM is an even greater benison.
†. This likely because such interoperability hasn’t raised its head for some years so ROI on the extra engineering needed may not (yet) be justified. I last recall Tinderbox/Scrivener interoperability being kicked around under Tinderbox v5—so, over 10 years ago (more than the lifespan of many of today’s apps!).
Perhaps the time for “interoperability” has passed – seems more like an 80s or 90s thing anyway.
Gilllie Bolton has been writing about the uses of the writing process in almost every aspect of life Education Medicine Being an Author. Self Help for about fifty years.
In 1958 Wesley Wilson and I did brain stimulattion studies on rats and were able to identify cortical and rhinencephalon connections that confirmed earlier silver stains developed by W. Nauta aa post doc who went on to high government office. I discovered Clark and Chalmers and Nakokojis work that began in Colorado. Early on I found TBX useful in diagraming educational relationships and goals and links lustration how to integrate “siloed” pieces of research.early brain development and also neuropasticity after injury. II was an early member of the Neuropsychoanalysis group that is clarifying the role of the NeuroPsychoanalysis group that enabled Jaak Panksepp to identify the early emotions in mammals. Merlueau-Ponty brought in the lowest level of UCS processing and its relation to PTSD. Strongly recommend Clarks paper on the Mole Cricket to integrate all these influences on biology and consciousness.
Roger
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Nice message. I’ve reached out to Dr. Bolton to see if she’d join and speak at one of our weekly meet-ups. If any of you know her personally, maybe you can put in a good word.