Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I'm afraid I'm rather unclear about why you don't like portrait orientation for eBook devices. It seems the "natural" way to do it, given that this orientation has been proven by centuries of experience in printed books to be what works best.
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This must be an American English vs. British English thing.
The ergonomics of reading mandate fairly short lines, I certainly agree. Our centuries of experience have shown that the best way of delivering those short lines on paper is to have the layout of the paper track the layout of the text -- thus pages which are shorter horizontally than they are vertically.
For e-book reading devices all I'm saying is that other layouts are possible and haven't been tried yet. One could have a device with a landscape display which shows two columns/"pages" of pure text, but allows large images to fill the entire display. One could have a flexible-screen device which could unroll to a portrait display for text, then unroll further to a landscape display as per the latter two colums/pages etc. Such displays would allow one to easily view two documents side-by-side, for comparing changes, for bilingual text, for text and commentary/annotations, and so on.
Ultimately all I'm saying in that e-book devices introduce other options, and we won't know for certain what's optimal until our civilization has as much experience with the digital text as it does with the printed page.
-Marshall