[RJ_Cruze_Jr]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Sigh here we go again. The ultimate purpose of typography is to convey information to the end user in an efficient manner.

A hand crafted, fixed size layout achieves a certain boost in cognition, lets say that boost is x units.

Now the boost in cognition achievable by using semantic markup, which allow computers to preprocess information before presenting it to the user is y, where y is a number that grows exponentially as the amount of information available to process grows. To put it succintly

y >> x

Therefore to claim that we should sacrifice the gigantic boost is cognition that semantic formats allow for the tiny and static boost in cognition that hand crafted, fixed size layouts allow, is ridiculous.

Now the boost in cognition I receive from a hand-crafted, fixed size layout is so much smaller than the boost in cognition I receive from a layout that allows computers to preprocess the information and there

To take your technical terms and put them into... um, more technical terms, the story is the signal, and the book is the carrier. And the purpose of that carrier is to convey that signal from the author to the reader. Both paper books and electronic books serve that purpose quite well. Thanks to several centuries of technological lead time, paper books are a much more aesthetically and sensually pleasing than e-books. However, if you strip away the leather covers and the gilded page edges, it's still just a carrier.

Now, this is a purely subjective and utterly unscientific observation, but I have downloaded the electronic editions of many books that I own in paper format, and I have to say that I find the stories just as enjoyable in e-format as I did in hardcopy. Whether as dollops of ink on wood pulp, or pixels on liquid crystal, a thumping-good read is a thumping-good read.

Mind you, I think that there's still a lot of room for improvement in the electronic carrier, but I'm sure that will come as the technology matures.