On-screen Reading

Love the comments…

Underland is positioning itself as an in print, online publisher. I’d like for the content Underland publishes in book form to be available in other forms as well: on-screen reading, online reading, podcasts, web serials, etc. On our web site now, we’re doing a project called  a wovel, or web novel. The idea is to combine the creativity of fiction with the pace of print journalism with the interactivity of web 2.0.

Every week an author writes an installment. At the end of every installment is a binary plot branch point, with a vote button at the end: A or B. Is the box empty, or is it filled with bees? Readers vote, the author gets the results. Voting closes on Thursday, the author writes over the weekend, and a new installment is posted on Monday. Every Monday, rain or shine.

Look at the wovel here. Listen to the NPR article about it here.

I can tell you more about Underland’s experience with the wovel–the types of stories (action based), the results (growing readership), how many readers we’re getting (about 16,000 page views a month), and how we’re making it work financially (online sales of print books). But, in response to some of the comments on my previous posts, I’d like to offer some thoughts about on-screen fiction, cause that’s where the interesting creative frontier is, now.

Some thoughts about online fiction:

Books (lets just say stories) are made of words organized into units of meaning. Those units are displayed, traditionally, with ink on paper. This is a pleasing and elegant display, and it has worked for thousands of years.

There are other ways to display the units, though. A computer screen is one of them. A Kindle screen or iphone screen are others. (Self evident, yes, but go with me a little more…)

There’s a compelling argument that holds that the way the story is told is dependent partly on the way the story is displayed. Ie: a novel is a different beast, formally, than a magazine serial, is different than a story made for podcast.

This is where it starts to get cool, because this is where the interesting creative stuff lives. A story written online, to be read on-screen, must be different than a story written for paper and ink. The way we read is different, therefore the way we write must be different.

I think this is an exciting challenge for authors and writers. The audience is there, the modes of delivery are being developed. Now an author has to come along who really, really understands how to tell a story for the screen, not for the page.

Some thoughts: 1) The paragraphs have to be shorter. (Notice, for instance, that my last five paragraphs are no more than three sentences long. Why? It feels right, but it’s also easier to read, I think.)

2) The language can be (must be?) a bit more informal. This doesn’t mean lazy language, but tight language. Fragments are okay. Pauses, too.

3) There is room for pictures, as in a blog. Some print authors are doing this now, as in W.G. Seabald’s The Rings of Saturn.

4) There is room for back and forth commenting with the readers. (Thoughts, anyone? And please don’t anybody comment on how horrible the word “wovel” is. I like it, it’s silly, and I’m going to keep it…)

More thoughts: Blogs have done a great job with text display: margin size, line length, point size, etc. The fiction world has to step up, figuring out what works for on-screen reading.

To be clear, an on-screen story will be different than an on-page story. Not “novels” anymore, but something different. Something new.

31 comments on “On-screen Reading

  1. Top notch!

    This is good information. Thanks, Victoria. There are things here that I believe should be very helpful to myself and others.

  2. 4) There is room for back and forth commenting with the readers. (Thoughts, anyone? And please don’t anybody comment on how horrible the word “wovel” is. I like it, it’s silly, and I’m going to keep it…)

    I am still relatively paralyzed at the thought of commenting on what could be considered, in some light, to be the text of a story itself. It’s one thing to write snarky or agreeable notes in my own books, but the idea of altering the reading experience of other readers is more problematic, to say nothing of possible insult to the author.

    If I recall correctly, there have also been discussions around the commenting/not commenting question for fiction at both Fantasy Magazine and Clarkesworld Magazine. Some stories get a half-dozen comments, some zero. Most seem to amount to “I liked it” or “I didn’t like it.” The one true dialogue I’ve seen (I haven’t looked at every comment trail) wound up an acrimonious argument about whether the story was or wasn’t racist/culturally insensitive.

  3. (N.B. I don’t think this mean online fiction isn’t being read, just that we haven’t figured out how to interact with it yet.)

  4. DiversHands says:

    Actually, your points are ones I have been dealing with myself lately. While I go nowhere with out my trusty black notebook and cheap Bic pens, the majority of the writing I do is on a laptop (which goes all but ninety percent of the places I venture. Additional note: it really freaks people in public out when you have an open laptop sitting in front of you, but you are busy writing long hand in a notebook. Will continue to explore this phenomenon.). The thing is, the way I compose words in a notebook is extremely dissimilar to how I compose them in a word processor. With a notebooks finite space restrictions, I tend to cram as many words as I can onto a line, rarely leave spaces between ideas or projects, and generally fill every available white space with ink. With a word processor though, the only limit is how much memory I have available; and text files take up mere bites of space. I will tumble words, write things backwards, skip multiple spaces or lines or pages in order to reinforce a story point, or lend a visual cue to the verbal one. However, while engaged in this tom-foolery, I do in fact find myself wondering if any sane publisher of physical objects would actually agree to these excesses.

    While I realize that authors like Danielewski and Placencia have had volumes published that do odd things with the page (and whatever flaws it may have, McSweeney’s hardcover of ‘The People of Paper’ remains my favorite book as an artifact since I was a child) I have to question whether or not publishers are actually amenable to those kinds of things. I mean, how exactly does someone go about pitching to a publisher the idea that you need to print only one word on a page for five hundred pages, and all of those words will require different fonts, sizes and colours? And worse, with agents and editors and what have you filling the space between author and published book, how many times do you have to pitch something like that?

    Of course, electronic publishing diminishes the concern for space requirements, but does raise a whole other set of questions: does the host or reader have the appropriate software to support the format and configuration of your ‘cutting edge wovel’. Should we start introducing industry standards now on what operating systems or program standards we want? What does someone like me, who cobbles half-assed code into an open source word processor no one has heard of, do to explain the parameters for how I expect my work to look, or move as has sometimes been the case lately…

    I think we too often think of the electronic frontier of the interweb as this vast and infinitely open realm where anything is possible, but in fact, it has a large number of very set rules and systems. Worse, to me at least, is that right now readers of printed works have a set of expectations on how things should be read. With the new possibilities provided by the programmed work, do we have to start including instructions on how something should be read? (I know, some of you are shaking your heads at that, but I once TA’d for a class in college in which the first volume of Brian Azzarello’s ‘100 Bullets’ was being taught, and I actually had to explain to many of the students how to follow the flow of the art across the page before many of them could even begin to follow the story.)

  5. Seth Merlo says:

    Another great post. It reminds me of the current discussion around the idea of transmedia storytelling – not just taking the same story and adapting it to various media, but telling a complete story across multiple platforms, where readers are asked to engage with several components in order to access the whole story. I like this idea, as it brings storytelling into the 21st century in a big way without necessarily having to compromise the integrity of the writing.

  6. One large problem with on-screen reading for me is that I just don’t want to sit in front of a monitor. I just don’t find it a pleasant way to read, certainly not things of any real length. Some people even get headaches, although personally only if it’s been many hours – but then I like to sit and read a novel for hours…

    I’m chiefly interested in ‘electronic fiction’ in terms of what can be done that’s unique to the particular format used, e.g. hypertext linking – I think it’s a bit more exciting than just using it as yet another format for linear page-by-page reading. Otherwise I don’t really see a point in having it in this form to begin with. Having said that though, what you seem to be doing with the Wovel DOES seem fairly innovative.

    I’m very biased though; I love books as physical things and have regarded the digital revolution’s impact on the literary world with extreme trepidation for a while.

  7. GlenH says:

    We here at Ecstatic Days know all about wovels and it seems to me that people interact with them just fine: https://www.jeffvandermeer.com/2008/10/page/4/

    (Scroll down to bottom for the intro at “Do not adjust your browser”; the wovel proper begins at “Pirate Stream; MAJORITY RULE”)

    Courtesy of Mr Vandermeer’s guest we also know all about other forms of innovative web fiction: http://silence-without.blogspot.com/search/label/7wishes

    (Scroll down past “too old”, “contents” and “triceratops to read “7 wishes”)

    *Ducks to avoid shurikans from outraged ninja*

  8. The wovel is a very cool idea, but I think it’s important that traditional novels also be published digitally. There many people with physical disabilities who simply cannot use paper books. For example, I can only move my thumb, but with assistive technology I can do just about anything on a computer. Everything I read and write is digital, paper is absolutely useless to me. Obviously, paper is the most elegant medium for reading, but e-books are a requirement for me and many others.

  9. Excuse my typo, apparently I can’t proof-read at 4:10 AM.

  10. Michael, you raise a very good point and one I’d completely forgotten about when commenting before. I tend to get a bit caught up in the fear that print will become completely superceded by digital formats just because it’s ‘the next big thing’ rather than thinking about any actual benefits that it might have.

    What digital format do you tend to use to read? Although I don’t usually read Ebooks except in the context of studies (ie. not reading fiction, recreationally) I find Adobe Acrobat offers the most faithful & comfortable reproduction of a physical book-reading experience, while a lot of others (especially HTML or .txt/.doc) tend to just seem too sterile and ‘digital’. I like .PDFs, they often have that “stack of photocopies you made at the library” feel to them.

  11. there is a principle in quantum mechanics that we change the world every time we “look” at it or interact with it. If you have an opened ended story and not the great American novel, then an interactive experience could be cool.

  12. Alex, I definitely love .PDFs, I also like the Palm eBook format, as both are entirely cross-platform. I do my reading on a Mac, but e-books shouldn’t be platform-exclusive.

  13. Sir Tessa says:

    Outraged ninjas will not attack you at such an obvious location, Mister Glen, as ninjas do not get outraged. They’re all for cold, perfect, long-simmering vengeance. Which is unlikely to occur as I don’t think you’ve impugned the honour of my whatevers with that prop, heh. Ta.

    To be fair, the pirate/ninja fight isn’t a wovel by Victoria’s definition. It was entirely prewritten, including all the options you never saw, so it’s a standard choose your own adventure. Only the end was written fresh, as I had no idea where either ninja and pirate would be at that time. Even merely turning that around in the space of a night was a leap, so anyone who can do it every weekend has my admiration.

  14. On thinking on it, though, Tad William’s Shadowmarch originally started as a wovel (although that wasn’t the term thrown about at the time), the origins of which you can see here. That was back in 2001, about the same time Stephen King was toying with online fiction and The Plant (I think that’s the right title), essentially an already completed novel written as per usual, released chapter by chapter on a week by week basis, and with a tip jar for those who wanted to contribute. Tad wrote Shadowmarch on the fly. There were no explicit decisions granted to the reader, but the idea was to write with the readers’ comments and feedback in mind.

    It wasn’t viable in the end, cost too much to keep it running and he was paying for the entire set up out of pocket. There was a subscription fee set up, with the first chapters free and pay to read on, but I think that’s a model that only really works if you already possess dedicated fans. Still got two dead tree books out of it.

  15. I see parallels between this post of yours and an emerging story form: video games.

    “Classic” video games are huge, epic and long, with hours of gameplay and puzzles and sometimes dialogue. The memorable, immersive games of yore were much like novels – King’s Quest, for instance, or the Legend of Zelda. They weren’t particularly good novels, but that’s a different post…

    Nowadays, there’s a divergence in the medium towards casual games like Popcaps’ endless waves of addictions, collaborative experiences like the virtual worlds of SecondLife and World of Warcraft, and traditional-style, immersive story games like Mass Effect, Bioshock, Force Unleashed, and etc.

    Fiction has been resistent to the media shifts of the information age. Video games have thrived in it.

    Alternative story experiences exist. I think the Wovel is somewhat similar to an MMORPG, in that the “story” is a product of collaboration among the the people experiencing the story. They vote on the direction the story should take. Short fiction – especially the on-line magazines that are beginning to dominate the field – is quite a lot like flash games, designed for a few moments of pleasure alone.

    One limitation of the form of wovel that I see is that it will be difficult to monetize it. Money isn’t everything, especially in publishing, but people are accustomed to getting quality free things on the internet. It is not easy to re-train consumers to pay for something they are used to getting for free, like blogs. Ad space can only bring in so much revenue. Unlike a film project like Dr Horrible that translates well to DVD, Wovels would probably not have the same level of a secondary market off-line in a bound book form.

    Perhaps I’m pushing the relationships a little farther than quite works. My point, however, is that video games have thrived to become a dominant entertainment industry. Films have begun the shift, too, and seen fiscal results that merit more expansion into other mediums. Fiction, however, always seems to be waxing and waning around authors and fads that destroy as many publishing imprints as they create.

    Publishing houses, with their glacial response times, and high individual workloads are not nimble on the marketplace, shifting into new forms.

    I mean, how long did it take for Tor to have a website worthy of the largest science fiction publisher in the world?

  16. Bob Lock says:

    Have you guys checked out Issuu yet? It’s an excellent site and very user friendly. They convert your PDFs into a book-flipping format which is much easier on the eye to read. You can search, expand, bookmark, do loads of things with it. They host your work on their server and all this is free.

    I’ve given it a try with a SF novella of mine and it’s here if you want to take a look:-

    http://issuu.com/bob_lock/docs/a_cloud_of_madness_sf?mode=embed&documentId=090115174450-6882fef7587c45a49531779da388ab9f&layout=grey

    Cheers,
    Bob

  17. I actually only know one person who doesn’t mind reading on line or on a kindle. Everyone else I know, to a man and woman, strongly prefer printed media.

    All your points are quite valid, but my feeling is that people already spend so much time linked into digital devices that the majority of human beings find it much more like work than pleasure to read on a screen. In their leisure tme they like to be outdoors; or if they read they don’t want to read on-line.

    Just as an example: I can get many books for free in e-text form, but never do. I prefer to pay twenty dollars to have something I can have in my hands, despite the bulk and the fact that I have so many books that it is literally a bit of a problem.

    I think the wovel idea is fantastic; but still only see digital media as a relatively shallow form that doesn’t allow for the meditative space needed for profound revelation when reading.

  18. Well, I went online and asked my local public library to order Brian Evenson’s Last Days.

  19. jeff vandermeer says:

    and I am reading all this from a plane! woooovel!

  20. Divers Hands says:

    I actually think that this revulsion to reading things on a screen is the myth of the previous generation. Like the idea that sitting too close to a television screen is bad for your eyes (it isn’t, by the by; or at least no worse than any other long term use of your eyes is), we’ve propagated this idea that reading from a screen is uncomfortable or unsettling. The funniest part of this idea to me, is that it is delivered dead pan by people who I have witnessed spend a nine hour stretch watching football on a weekend, or a movie marathon run during a late night blitz. I can’t think of a single person I know between the ages of ten and twenty-five who have any issue with spending hours upon hours reading piecemeal off websites on their PC/laptop, or spend a couple of hours a day observing text messages and other data on tehir phones.

    I hate to say it, but I think people who use the screen excuse are just lazy. I do not intend that as a direct insult, but more of a general one on the public’s attitude towards reading fiction. People who desire to know something will spend hours researching information on the internet, or staring at the miniscule and densely packed typeface of a newspaper with no complaint, but ask them to read a book online and they “don’t have the time.” Which coincedentally was the exact same excuse people had before the prevalence of the internet and eBooks. The real issue is that the majority of people simply do not want to be engaged with their entertainment, they want it presented to them with little to no effort on their part.

    As a caveat, I do understand that one of the advantages of a book is its ease of travel, which was a definite advantage over the less than mobile PC and the somewhat awkward/fragile nature of the laptop. But having handled a Kindle recently, I defintely feel that the last real hurdle to eBooks – portability during casual travel – has come to an end. The biggest problem now is cost. Both of the eBook reader and the rates of the works themselves. The first should just be a matter of competition and new construction/materials. The latter I feel may be a great deal more thorny as there are the issues of royalties, distribution, hosting, inherent value, etc.

  21. Seth Merlo says:

    The only reason I was prescribed glasses was because I spend all day looking at a computer screen. I’m long sighted, so the sustained close-up work was giving me headaches. So no, it’s not always just an excuse to avoid reading online. You’re right though that in general we’ve misconstrued this notion that reading from a screen is uncomfortable, but at the same time, everything in moderation. It’s the same as that age-old recommendation not to read in low light because it strains your eyes.

    I think the problem is not so much between reading from a screen vs. reading a book, but people wanting to read in the first place. You hinted at this with your comment re: engagement, but like you said, people will read and research when they have the desire to, so I think it becomes a matter of instilling that desire and finding out what it is people want to read and what they will find entertaining. This doesn’t mean that you have to spoon-fed people the lowest common denominator rubbish; I’m talking more about knowing your market and its trends in order to build a sustainable business.

    The other reason I prefer a book to a screen is because I find a book much less distracting. If I’m reading online, I’m always clicking on other links, looking up words or topics mentioned in the text, etc. It’s very hard to stay focussed, even if the piece is only short. Even if I’m only reading a book for 30mins, at least that’s a period of sustained reading and allows me to engage more fully with the book I’m reading. Having said that, I haven’t had the opportunity to play with a Kindle or similar device, so I’m perfectly willing to change that opinion once that happens.

    You also raise a good point re: people between the ages of 10 and 25. Generally speaking, you’re talking about a generation born into a world that moves so quickly that they just don’t have the attention span for the kind of sustained reading that the older amongst us are probably more used to. They’re used to flitting between several different mediums and assimilating relevant information quickly, which is where the short paragraphs etc. that Victoria was already spoken about come into play. There’s plenty of opportunity for some exciting new developments, but also plenty of space to fail as well. It’s going to be interesting seeing what initiatives stick and which bomb.

  22. Jeff, how’d you get that contraption past homeland security?

  23. Seth Merlo says:

    Just to respond directly to Victoria’s post – I’m apprehensive about the idea of making the language of screen-based stories informal. I agree totally that informal doesn’t have to mean lazy, but I wonder what sort of precedent this might establish? To most people, informal language means a more colloquial, dare I say ‘street level’ language, and I see this kind of language easily becoming the norm at the expense of genuinely well-written material. The last thing any of us would want to see is any more of a dumbing down of the written word than the internet already allows for. Clarkesworld, I think, is doing an excellent job of balancing traditional written conventions with online publishing, without losing sight of just plain great storytelling in the process.

  24. Benedict says:

    Bees please! Sarcastic, jaded, cynical bees whose snide put downs are far more fearsome than their sting.

  25. Divers Hands: I don’t think I’d dismiss as simply the fact that many people just don’t like to read large amount of texts at a time on a screen, whether it’s on a handheld, monitor, or laptop. I don’t really see what laziness has to do with it: if you’re willing to plough through several hundred pages of a story and give it your full attention from start to finish, whether on a screen or on a page, then you’re putting in as much effort as anyone might expect. There have been times in the past, for instance with Jeff’s novel ‘The Situation’ which he generously gave away as a free PDF or with authors such as Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Chambers, and William Hope Hogson whose works are now in the public domain where I could have easily read what I wanted online for free but went to the effort and expense of buying hard-copies – simply because I really don’t like onscreen reading, and also because I enjoy owning and collecting books.

    This piecemeal reading that you mention is an entirely different mode of behaviour: we’re not passively clicking or scrolling through a large body of text, it’s more interactive, we’re ‘surfing the web’ not ‘reading’ in the same way we would a novel. Hence, I suppose, your point about attention spans coming into play – many people aren’t geared toward those kinds of long periods of passive concentration in front of a PC. Watching TV is also a different experience, the most passive of all, and very different indeed from reading a novel – I couldn’t imagine reading 500 pages via sitting in front of a TV and watching it scroll down in front of my eyes. They’re all invalid comparisons, apples and oranges, and you don’t take into account the vast differences in which the way these formats have been used and in which we’ve become mentally trained to using them in the past. I don’t think it’s a generational thing.

    At the risk of sounding like a luddite, even devices like The Kindle cannot hope to capture the real visceral pleasure of reading printed books, it just feels far too sterile and soulless an experience. Perhaps cultures with more oral narrative traditions might have felt the same way about the written word. To me, as I’ve said before on here, a book is more than just the words it contains, I like the cover art, I like the feel of the pages, I like books as physical objects as well as merely as a format – and I think this is a similar argument vinyl fans would use when decrying the rise of the MP3. It’s just not the same.

  26. Divers Hands says:

    Unfortunately Alex, I think your comment does more to prove my theory of the myth of books than anything.

    To begin, I understand that reading is a far different experience than watching television. The point however, was not to compare apples (the active engagement with words) to oranges (the passive engagement with image), but to point out that our eyes have already been acclimatized to staring at lit screens to acquire information. While reading engages the mental activity of the viewer a great deal more than simply watching some program or film, there, for the most part, is no actual physical difference to our eyes when it comes to reading or watching. If you are in fact straining your eyes while reading off a screen, it is because you need to reset the type size, and you would in all liklihood be straining just as much to make out the text were it not situated on a monitor.

    As for not being able to read 500 pages “scrolling” on a screen, I fear that once again you are aiding my proof of it being a generational thing. I have been out of university three years now, but even when I was there, the majority of my research, class room presentations and general work was done via scrolling through text. Hell, even when I was student teaching the local high school to which I was assigned involved a great deal more usage of the monitor, or projected monitor format, than I was accutomed to from my own high school days five years prior. The current crop of college graduates has probably spent the majority of their lives reading text off of monitors, and I have yet to notice any studies or research pointing out that this generation displays more signs of fatigue or eye strain for it. Further, while there is no doubt that a generation raised on books, and only books (all right so that really includes comics, magazines, newspapers, etc.), may have some trouble with the percieved differences in format that were rigidly obvious between the written and the filmed, these days that actual line is non-existant. The early video games required scrolling text to explain the storylines running between the activities of the player. The first on-line multi-player games allowed people to send text messages to each other while co-ordinating attacks or maneuvers. My first year in college was dominated by the use of instant messaging services to perform the majority of communications with my friends and colleagues. The ability to embed text inside of videos is still frequently used amongst the droves of YouTube videos and their clones. My generation was probably the true transitional generation when it came to the melding of past formats, but the ones after us would undoubtedly be hard pressed to truly grasp that at one point, with the exception of captioning, that text was a truly seperate medium from any of the others. The current zeitgeist seems to be the ammalgamation of anything; the more unusual the components the better.

    Finally, we come to the point that is going to make me sound the most like an asshole, but I still feel should be rebutted. Don’t get me wrong, I love books: I love the way new books smell of fresh ink and warm pressed pulp. I love the musty funk of used books, and the fascinating hieroglyphs of stain and mark past owners impress upon them. A well designed dust jacket is a thing of beauty, and the gritty viscereal feel of a cloth cover brings up memories of every library I have ever wandered. And in no way do any of these things change the way I read the words inside the book. Forgive me, but I have never stopped mid-sentence while reading and thought “My god, the texture of this cover, or these pages against my hands is amazing!”. When I read, all that matters are the words on the page/screen and the impressions and images they pull into my head. Nothing else matters or intrudes to me when I am fully engaged with a story, and whether or not that applies to other people, I still feel that the entire point of producing fiction is to acheive that total abduction of your reader. If you actually find the text to be enhanced by the physical object in your hands, I think you may be doing it wrong. (of course, if the author is actually using the book to do things with the text [see my reference to Salvador Placencia’s ‘People of Paper’ in an earlier post] than that would be different. Those however tend to be the exception, and not the rule.)

    A collector is not the same as a consumer (at least in the non-commercial sense). I know baseball card collectors who can’t stand to actually watch the game, and comic book collectors who have never actually read the books they purchased. To return to your example, I have friends who collect vinyl who have never owned, if even actually seen, an actual record player. That said, there actually is a huge difference between a vinyl album, or even a CD, and a digital copy of an album. Most digital formats for music greatly degrade the sound quality of the recording, allowing for more music to be saved on smaller drives. And since most computer or mp3 player speakers are not of incredibly high quality, the majority of people don’t really notice. If you are a true music fan however, quality is everything. There are all kinds of subtle intonations, layered instrument/vocal tracks, etc. that can make the difference between a good song and a great song for a conneseur. There are very few cases in the world of text that a digital copy differs in any way to the physical. In fact, the digital version is almost always superior in that it allows for the manipulation of things like size or font that may make the reading experience easier for the viewer.

    I would direct you to John Siracusa’s article at Ars Technica from earlier this week (just came across it today myself) which in a fine bit of serendipity addresses the issue of the eBook, and does a much better job of making some of my points: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/2009/02/the-once-and-future-e-book.ars

  27. I still find I don’t agree with referring to reading narrative works for recreation in the same way as “acquiring information” – it’s probably a very personal thing but I’m in a completely different mindset when I’m clicking through a blog or reading something from JSTOR, I don’t relax into the same way of reading. Even with early text-advanture games that I used to play, the time spent reading blocks of text between interacting was still nowhere near the amount that it would be when reading a traditional story.

    Sorry if the tone was a little confrontational in my comment, it wasn’t intended. The rebuttal didn’t sound assholish at all, in fact “My god, the texture of this cover…” made me crack a smile – yes, what I wrote about the “feel of the pages” did sound a bit silly, but I can’t deny that reading via computer just doesn’t feel pleasurable, probably slightly down to my overromanticising printed formats and resistance to change but I suppose it’s something I can’t fully articulate – it just feels wrong. Even when reading the most enjoyable of works onscreen I still can’t fully shake it.

    The links look interesting, thank you: I’ll have a look when I have a little more time and am not desperately fighting a losing battle between my novel & procrastination…

  28. Divers: There are actual bad effects to sitting in front of a screen that you don’t get from sitting in front of…air.

    Also, you’re mistaking the writer being invisible to the typesetting and design elements being invisible. Depending on the book, too, invisible design is NOT the best way to introduce a reader into a text and make it reader-friendly. Also, I’ve yet to see a typeset page online that can match that in a book. You’re not really thinking about the fact it’s invisible because some expert MADE it invisible.

    jeff

  29. sinema says:

    At first I thought you told Google to call the library, and it did, and that blew my mind.

    Then I realized that you actually called the library, and my mind became unblown.
    I’ll get back to work…

    If you ask my opinion about this topic I really like. Thank you for sharing your friends. Hope to see you another day.

  30. edevlet says:

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