William J. Polley

Sounds like conservative old-fashioned'ness to me.

Print format of a book or newspaper is not so great that it should be replicated on the computer. It may be optimal for print, but for a computer it is sub-optimal.

The newspaper thing is especially silly. Online newspapers should not be trying to make themselves look as much like the print version as possible. They should be trying to take advantage of the computer as much as possible.

With computers, information can be easily indexed, searched, and reformatted. Give us a list of articles in the newspaper and let us select which one to display (and display it in the way that the user prefers, i.e., font, size, columns, etc.). Allow us to define our interests as well, so that articles that match certain subjects or keywords are at the top of the article list or otherwise made to stand out.

For books, two facing pages that turn is an odd requirement. More important is the ability for the user to choose the font and size and number of columns (or else have the computer take a guess at it based on the size, orientation, and resolution of the computer screen). There should be an efficeint way of allowing the user to move through the text, and naturally page up and page down should be a choice, but also there should be line at a time choices, paragraph up and down, and a scroll bar as well. Why force the page turning thing? If a graph or table is on one page and the text describing it is on the back of the page, then the book metaphor is not optimal. With the computer, you can simply scroll a few lines and have both on screen at once.

Unfortunately, what is really holding back computer books is not the fact that the programmers have failed to slavishly duplicate a physical book. The problem is resolution. The cheapest computer printers are 300 dots per inch and books and magazines are mostly 1200 to 3000 dots per inch. THe highest resolution computer screens are only about 120 dots per inch, and most are below 100.

Your point about the resolution is definitely true. The typical resolution on a computer display simply cannot display the same number of words in the same number of square inches. That means more scrolling on a computer than page turning in a book. Big problem.

And you're right about having choice about the layout. All of what you say is fine. In fact, on a widescreen tablet PC, I would like it to give you the option of a double page spread for holding it one way vs a one long page for holding it the other way. That, to me, seems another advantage of the tablet--that you could orient the screen depending on the task.

So let me amend my statment a little. The problem with pdf files is that you can't modify the font, the columns, etc. Because of the resolution problem, you can't get a good view of the full page either. So, it would be nice if there was an e-book format that allowed you to rearrange the content on the page and reformatting the document dynamically. Acrobat Reader can't do that, and that, together with the resolution issue, is the real problem.

And I may be old fashioned, but if it's text (not graphics--your point is well taken for graphs and tables) then I would want one of the standard formats to be in the layout of a book (with the ability to choose font size, etc.) But I'll give you this much, that this would mainly be for things meant to be read linearly. In those cases, periodic page turning is sometimes preferable to constant scrolling. Different strokes for different folks. The point is that the software isn't available to do what either you or I want (or an ideal combination of what we each want).

I would think that such a thing, whatever it ends up looking like, would be great for commuters who could download the paper to their tablet PC and read it on the train off-line. (Same content without the ink stains.) I think it would be even better if your suggestions (e.g. prioritizing articles based on your stored set of preferences) were added.

I agree with almost all of your statements in the comment. In particular, I agree that Acrobat cannot do most of what I suggest. And I think that the ebook idea you mentioned of having a default layout similar to a physical book is fine, as long as the option exists to do things differently. I disagree about the linear text comment -- even with text the best place to break is usually at a paragraph or at least at a sentence. I frequently find myself flipping pages back and forth when a complicated sentence gets broken across a page. Having sentence and paragraph forward/back buttons would be a boon (or page down that goes slightly less than a full screen in order not to break a sentence or paragraph).

My "old-fashioned" comment was mostly directed to the idea you quoted of duplicating the look of a print newspaper on the computer screen. The horror! Will they even include "continued on p37"???

"Will they even include 'continued on p37'???"

Oh, I hope not!

Some kind of "smart scrolling" or dynamic formatting would be nice so as not to break sentences across the page (or the screen).