Reading is un-natural!
Well, the title is just meant to grab your attention, and be gratuitously inflamatory. I hope it worked.
But it's probably true anyway.
The recent growth in e-reader usage got me thinking about how technology can improve the activity of reading. Actually, it's something I've thought about from time to time even before e-readers got popular.
To me, e-readers are useless if they perpetuate old ways of reading. For example, I see no reason to have page boundaries if I'm reading something on a screen. It makes sense for a book to have pages, due to the limitations in that particular technology. But nothing annoys me faster than a web page that is split up by pages, and restricted to fixed margins, for the simple reason that its publishers couldn't think outside the box, and couldn't take advantage of the absence of old restrictions.
My latest thought along these lines is to go even further. Line-breaks really disrupt the flow, interrupt concentration, and cause distraction. Additional distraction is caused by the text in the lines immediately above and below the one I'm reading. How many times have you been reading something, and had to correct yourself because a word crept-into the sentence you were reading - a word that wasn't even there. Then you discover that it was on the next line. So, why not omit line-breaks altogether?
I know, it sounds crazy, but don't dismiss it just yet. Imagine an e-reader which only displays one line of text, which scrolls past as you read it. Yeah, I basically just re-invented an old idea: the marquee. But what makes this different from a marquee is that it also has eye-tracking. It uses the eye tracking to control the speed with which the text scrolls by (from right to left) as you read it (from left to right).
Maybe this has already been thought of (it probably has). Maybe we have to jump through some intermediate steps to get there (like, oh, cheap and ubiquitous e-readers). Or maybe it's a bad idea. I'll admit, there is something to be said for seeing a whole page laid-out before you, so you have the option to skip around, and look at diagrams. Maybe a hybrid approach is called-for (e.g., each paragraph is its own marquee, which places black bars above and below the point you're focusing on as you read it, to block out distractions from other paragraphs/marquees).
In related news, I'm totally slacking on the book reviews. I know this. Not that anyone's pushing me (other than myself). I've been dragging my feet on reviewing "The Blank Slate", because it's going to be a hard one to do. Not only does it cover a lot of ground - my review could easily get too long (like this post) - but it's also one of those politically charged subject areas, which I'll have to tiptoe around.
But it's probably true anyway.
The recent growth in e-reader usage got me thinking about how technology can improve the activity of reading. Actually, it's something I've thought about from time to time even before e-readers got popular.
To me, e-readers are useless if they perpetuate old ways of reading. For example, I see no reason to have page boundaries if I'm reading something on a screen. It makes sense for a book to have pages, due to the limitations in that particular technology. But nothing annoys me faster than a web page that is split up by pages, and restricted to fixed margins, for the simple reason that its publishers couldn't think outside the box, and couldn't take advantage of the absence of old restrictions.
My latest thought along these lines is to go even further. Line-breaks really disrupt the flow, interrupt concentration, and cause distraction. Additional distraction is caused by the text in the lines immediately above and below the one I'm reading. How many times have you been reading something, and had to correct yourself because a word crept-into the sentence you were reading - a word that wasn't even there. Then you discover that it was on the next line. So, why not omit line-breaks altogether?
I know, it sounds crazy, but don't dismiss it just yet. Imagine an e-reader which only displays one line of text, which scrolls past as you read it. Yeah, I basically just re-invented an old idea: the marquee. But what makes this different from a marquee is that it also has eye-tracking. It uses the eye tracking to control the speed with which the text scrolls by (from right to left) as you read it (from left to right).
Maybe this has already been thought of (it probably has). Maybe we have to jump through some intermediate steps to get there (like, oh, cheap and ubiquitous e-readers). Or maybe it's a bad idea. I'll admit, there is something to be said for seeing a whole page laid-out before you, so you have the option to skip around, and look at diagrams. Maybe a hybrid approach is called-for (e.g., each paragraph is its own marquee, which places black bars above and below the point you're focusing on as you read it, to block out distractions from other paragraphs/marquees).
In related news, I'm totally slacking on the book reviews. I know this. Not that anyone's pushing me (other than myself). I've been dragging my feet on reviewing "The Blank Slate", because it's going to be a hard one to do. Not only does it cover a lot of ground - my review could easily get too long (like this post) - but it's also one of those politically charged subject areas, which I'll have to tiptoe around.