[SensualPoet]

I know we are already four pages in with this thread ... but relatively little has been said that has much to do directly with Craig Mod's musings about "fixing today's e-readers" over at Gizmodo as referenced in the OP.

For one thing, his entire article is in reference to the iBooks vs Kindle apps that run on an iPad. He doesn't once consider Kindle hardware vs Sony or any other e-ink experience -- he's simply bugged by the limitations of the apps on an iPad.

We're all agreed, to some extent, that typography matters; for some of us, it matters more than for others. Typography, as an art, is plainly absent from non-pdf documents on e-ink devices. Poetry, for example, is pretty much impossible on a Kindle.

There are some basic rules of typography -- like the innate pleasure delivered by the Golden Ratio -- that make reading easier. These things include the right balance of text size to leading to line length; they encompass x-heights on fonts and the merits of serif and sans serif depending on the message intended to be delivered. On ordinary settings, the Kindle 2 accomplishes the bare minimum of this successfully -- which is why some of us say the e-reader "disappears" in our hands. It's also why some other devices -- like the Astak -- appear to render text "crudely" in comparison.

It's my belief that the basic art of typography -- kerning, anyone? -- will improve over time on the standard e-reader in the same way that desk-top publishing came of age after a decade of visual hell and tools like Quark helped raise the entire industry's standards. A lot of Craig Mod's article on these grounds can be dismissed out of hand -- basic typography is already "good enough" for the page to disappear on a properly formatted e-ink document. You can find lots of such examples contributed by our own members here at MobileRead.

The second part of his article is about doing something "more" with the residual meta-data (ie not the author's work but your own reading experience). He goes on to suggest that the highlights of 10,000 readers should be linked together to produce "hot spots" of not-to-be-missed passages; or that we ought to be able to see the highlights of one famous author's private notes reading a second famous author. He, apparently, cares what Salman Rushdie scribbles in the margins whilst reading Joyce Carol Oates; I'm not convinced many of us are, however. And it certainly does NOT improve/fix the broken e-reader.

At the end of the day, what I like about an e-reader is that it brings to my favourite reading place -- that is, curled up in bed -- the author's imagination as created in written words. It's not about hearing the words (which is an entirely different way to consume them); it's not about interactively being clever while consuming them. It's just about reading. Other devices, and other times, are appropriate for social aspects of reading and in those -- outside of the reading itself -- the iPad may add value. But as it stands today, the Kindle 2 is not broken at all; it's a work in progress and already has caught the imagination of millions of regular readers.

And bravo! to that accomplishment!