At Home with John and Debbie

More Kindle-inspired thoughts.

I’m fairly convinced that, at least in principle, an ePaper screen with accessible buttons for flipping pages, can be as comfortable way to read a novel as an ordinary book is. For other kinds of book, my opinions vary: certain kinds of textbook or technical manual work better than others; a pop-up book is a non-starter.

One of the Kindle’s selling points is newspaper and magazine subscriptions. I can’t argue with the convenience. Even if we have newspapers delivered, we don’t hear it arrive, so there’s often repeated checks in the hallway. If I had a Kindle by my bedside, I could wake up and read the paper without even getting out of bed. Those trips to the recycling centre would be saved too.

The bad news is, that unlike a novel, I don’t think a newspaper fits on that screen. The Kindle screen is designed to closely mimic a standard book format. If it was a good idea to publish newspapers in that format, I’m certain it would have been done by now (at the scales of production we’re talking about, the industry could certainly find a way to print and bind that format at the speed and price required).

At sizes from tabloid through Berliner to broadsheet, the newspaper format is highly evolved to meet a number of needs. The fact that it has survived as long as it has, surely demonstrates that those needs outweigh the problems some people have wrestling with a broadsheet on public transport.

• It’s easy to skim a newspaper for the general gist of all its articles
• It’s easy to move from skim-reading mode to detailed-reading mode, when you find an article that interests you
• It’s easy to locate favourite sections, and easy to skip the parts you don’t want
• Like-themed articles can be clustered, so you are drawn from one to the next
• The format permits boxouts and illustrations, which you can seamlessly switch between
• The format permits a flexible combination of content and advertising
• Spectacular layout options are available - for example the Guardian’s often spectacular daily centre-spread photograph.

All of this means that a reader who’s learned the layout of a particular newspaper, can make it last for anything between a quick glance at the top story’s headline, through to reading every last word. When my daily commute was a forty minute bus journey, no matter how the traffic was, I would reach the end of the letters, just as we arrived at my destination. Heavy traffic meant I could choose to pay more attention to that potentially interesting world-news story. Faster progress meant skipping to the reviews sooner.

I could read the Web version of the newspaper in bed on my laptop if I wanted to — but I’d rather walk to the shop and buy paper, for now. Perhaps the eNewspaper will evolve until it has all the sophistication of its paper ancestor, but it will need time.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 7th, 2007 at 03:32 and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.