waffle

Let me expand on what I said about text. I think the day “e-reading” (shudder) will finally become successful will be the day they drop their obsession with stupid fucking pages.

Pages are helpful and merited units, yes. But the useful aspects of pages are not irreplaceable or unique to pages as such, and the rest of the concept is an invention of necessity. A page will always be a piece of paper, and as long as we continue to define our modern readers by such methods, we will hold them back.

Conceptually, what does a page have that’s of any value? It has a certain amount of layouted text on it, in a certain resolution. Surely that concept can, and has, transferred to the screen already. How many pages does one month of Waffle comprise? Fuck knows. I wouldn’t even hazard a guess on screenfuls, for one simple reason: it varies, heavily! (As it should: The world is not comprised solely of broadsheets or hardcovers anymore.) As does pages, across printings. Relying on page numbers for reference inescapably ties either the quotation to a perishable resource (or a PDF of every single edition) or the future editions of a work to the same layout as its predecessors. Clearly, it’s more useful than saying “the third sentence in the ninth paragraph in chapter 42″ — which may also change with editions — but it’s not an idea of unbridled brilliance.

The utility of the concept of a page is far from zero. It is not only entrenched culturally and historically but practically equal to “a mouthful of readable text”. But it is overrated, and in the face of competitive media, the rational aspects are subject to rational criticism.

So what do I mean by not obsessing with pages? Let’s take the iPhone (please). The width is 62.1 mm [2.4 inches]; let’s assume the bezel and padding (both outside and inside the screen) makes 50 mm (just under 2 inches) of useful screen real estate. Two memorable rules proscribe a readable line length at 39 characters (1½ English alphabets) and a good readable line length for a specific font size at twice the point size in picas. (Six picas currently trade for one inch at the renowned San Seriffe Stock Exchange and each pica can be further subdivided into 12 points, confusingly not always equal to whatever the device point might be.)

Given what we know so far, the iPhone portrait orientation offers just under 12 pica, and the landscape orientation a little less under 16 pica. That gives a good line length for the font size of 8 (device) pt; with the iPhone’s 166 dpi, that’s high resolution enough to be relatively tiny (one pixel is around 0.15 mm), but shoddy enough to be rather piddly. (You’re also staring into a lightbulb, instead of processed tree pulp, but that can be negated well with light-on-dark schemes, and we have better screen technologies on the way.) The landscape orientation is not too bad, but it’s not very high, so you can’t fit too many lines.

What reading on this cries out for is a larger screen. If we return to the slate specifically for just a minute, the screen sizes that have circulated are 7″ and 10″. Screen sizes are measured diagonally, and so if we assume a continued 3:2 ratio, a 7″ screen is four times as big as a 3.5″ screen. A 7″ slate in portrait should have no issues showing a near ideal line length in a comfortable (bigger) point size, something that itself aids legibility because of better font glyphs and clearer ligatures.

But what you have now is a bigger page. In the 10″ case (not 4x the 7″ again, but maybe roughly twice as big, however counterintuitive that may sound), you could flip to landscape and get roughly the same experience in two columns, each close to the optimal width (between 3″ and 4″), each high resolution. And what’s more, you could start using the media.

Imagine a magazine spread, only instead of a spread, it was an article. At places in the text, images would show up in the surroundings, as if they were layouted. Drag the screen around by the text, and movement gravitate around the columns, and they snap into place. Eye tracking notices when you’re getting close to the end of the second column and slides the next column into view at your next pause. Drag around by the images and figures and movement is more smooth — you can pan around images and zoom in to your liking, maybe even read image captions next to the things in the image they refer to. Coverage of a match in a sports magazine could replay a situation with an embedded video. Tapping the name of a person does something Find-like and brings up a list of previous (and optionally upcoming) mentions, or offers to search your other issues, books or bring up Wikipedia or Google.

This could absolutely be done. None of this is rocket science, and everything is possible to do today for a decreasingly princely sum over time.

And you offer me dead trees and papercut nostalgia.