e-mode
Have you ever noticed the reading mode of the Times Square news marquee? It scrolls in line axis and turns the corner. So far the hand held reading device has crippled itself in simulation of page rendering when it should be considering line axis scrolling with a pace, rather than page, control. This would also eliminate the need for eye scanning, achieving a strategic advantage over print reading.
But no, there is far more focus on modes of connectivity than on modes of legibility.
good looking
” some telegraphic code dictionaries (and the naval signal books that preceded them, back into the 17th century) are stunningly beautiful. The most beautiful, often, are those that are soiled and marked up through a decade or more of daily use, falling apart at the seams — indeed, much of their beauty may derive from those signs of quotidian usage for mundane and long-forgotten instances of communications. They are “typographically beautiful,” I think, but perhaps not in a conventional sense : their typography is heroic for being so functional, yet demonstrating the printer-typographer’s pride in subtleties and self-effacing engineering solutions to the challenges of ‘difficult composition’.” John McVey, SHARP-L
It appears that the SHARP membership is the least likely to resolve a list of the “100 most beautiful books”. Turns out there may be more than 100 kinds of good looking books.
size of a pocket
“The explosion of a star halfway across the universe was so huge it set a record for the most distant object that could be seen on Earth by the naked eye. The aging star, in a previously unknown galaxy, exploded in a gamma ray burst 7.5 billion light years away, its light finally reaching Earth early Wednesday. The gamma rays were detected by NASA’s Swift satellite at 2:12 a.m. “We’d never seen one before so bright and at such a distance,” NASA’s Neil Gehrels said. However, NASA has no reports that any skywatchers spotted the burst, which lasted less than an hour.”
It is useful to notice the background. The convergence of the cell phone and hand-held reading and network utililities appears to advance halfway across the universe, but it is a distant signal of the future.
All the dedicated, hand-held book simulators appear inconsequencial against this background. The constraint appears to be the size of the pocket. The cell phone is a small pocket device that has engendered more small pockets than the pocket watch. The book simulators are big pocket items. This is a legacy feature from the convention of the “pocket book” which was actually the “paperback” as introduced in the 1930’s. It was small, but it is too big now.
And then there is the half-square shape. The iPhone is the same proportion as the papyrus codex of late Antiquity. This followed from the cross-thatch of the papyrus cut from scrolls as perfect, grain-neutral squares folded into book folios. It was designed to be read by sectarians in the opened country. These sectarians were very possessive of their gospel which they carried in a telescoping mahdar pocket.