I've been involved in many projects in my 13 years at Microsoft, pretty much all of them to do with improving reading on the screen. I’m a “man with a mission”, and not ashamed to admit it. Oh, I know idealism might be regarded as old-fashioned and sneered at; but I’ve never been able to regard work as just a way to make a living. If I can’t feel I’m making a difference, it’s not worth doing.
Here’s my mission. I believe that reading has to transition from paper to the screen. It’s not just about getting rid of paper. It’s about improving access to information to billions more people in the world.
It was access to information, in books and libraries, that changed my own life. I could easily be doing some menial job and still living in a depressed housing project in the East End of Glasgow. Instead, more than a billion people are using technology I helped to invent, and Bill Gates uses me as an advisor to answer his detailed questions about reading and what Microsoft needs to do to improve reading on the screen.
I'm not trying to impress you with those statements. They’re really just to illustrate the difference reading made in my life. And that’s why I believe every child (and adult) in the world should have the right of access to the same wealth of information, so they can use it to improve their lives. See my Digital Declaration of Independence.
Anyway, if you wanted to produce a printed science textbook in, say, Swahili, you’d have to convince some publisher that you’d sell about 10,000 copies - because that’s the point at which sales break even with costs of printing, production, distribution etc.
However, if you wanted to produce the same book in an electronic version, all you’d have to do is find someone to translate the text, and replace the original language strings with the new ones.
That means the cost of books should come down dramatically, and access should go up just as dramatically.
Of course devices have to get cheaper too, and that is happening - maybe not as fast as we would like, but it is happening.
To make this really work, text on a screen has to become just as readable as paper. There’s no doubt in my mind it can be. There are screens which produce better text than print (I have a couple). It’s really just a matter of developing the right technology, and getting it out there. And that’s why I’m at Microsoft. With more than 600 million users of Windows and about 400 million users of Office, you can deploy that technology on an incredible scale. There’s nowhere else you can make such a dramatic impact.
If you want to change the world, change Windows and Office. That’s my mantra.
The Digital Declaration of Independence
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Word as a blogging tool
This is an experiment. Rather than mess about with the rudimentary text features in Blogger's editor, I'm posting this by using Word's blogging functionality. "This is a set of quotation marks," he said, just to make sure that these traveled across. Be nice if Word could somehow carry font embedding across into Blogger – then I wouldn't be stuck with the limited choices Blogger offers. This is
Arial Black. And this is Magneto.
So the fonts do travel – this is cool. But what happened to the quotation marks? I'm back to those dumb "Feet and Inches". More investigation needed here.
Of course, Arial Black and Magneto fonts are on my system. I'd be interested to know if this still works for someone who doesn't have them installed. That WOULD be cool!
But it doesn't. My son just hit my blog from his laptop. He sees only the Arial Black (I guess he has that on his system) but not Magneto. On my cellphone I see neither.
And I just noticed that the Arial Black I used turned up as Arial Black Italics. Since Arial Black has no true italic, this means the system's creating one of those horrible artificially-skewed versions of the regular font. Ugh!
Now Word has supported font embedding using Embedded OpenType (EOT) for a very long time (it was embedded TrueType back when it was first implemented). Internet Explorer has supported EOT since 1995 by using the code developed for Word. I used Word's "Save as" options to make sure the fonts were embedded.
Earlier this year I drove a move to make EOT a Web standard by opening up what was until then a proprietary Microsoft embedding format into an open standard. It's been submitted to the W3C.
Somewhere along the line, the embedding information is being stripped out. Either Word is stripping the embedded EOT font object out when it publishes a document as a Blog post, or it's being lost somewhere along the line. But there's no pointer to an embedded font object in HTML.
Be nice to get this fixed... Have to investigate to find our who's doing (or not doing) what...
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Dumb Quotation Marks: Inching Away From Readability
Why do many editing programs - like the one in which I'm typing at this moment - use "feet and inch" marks for quotations, instead of proper "curly quotes"?
I've tried copying and pasting the correct characters. They should look like this “ instead of this ". You can't just paste them into the text, though - and even if you paste them into the HTML in Blogger's editor using Windows Character Map, it seems to recognize the opening and closing quotes as the same Unicode character!
I've tried copying and pasting the correct characters. They should look like this “ instead of this ". You can't just paste them into the text, though - and even if you paste them into the HTML in Blogger's editor using Windows Character Map, it seems to recognize the opening and closing quotes as the same Unicode character!
U+201C is the Unicode for Left Double Quotation Mark
U+201D is the Unicode for Right Double Quotation Mark
U+2018 is the Unicode for Left Single Quotation Mark
U+2019 is the Unicode for Right Single Quotation Mark
I'm sure I could find a way to do this manually. But why should I have to do that every time I use a quotation?
This is a mark for the measure of Feet '
This is the mark for Inches "
One day we'll have decent typography on the Web which will be smart enough to do this automatically.
Microsoft Word has been clever about this for a long time now. When you type the quotation marks on your keyboard, it uses the typographically correct quotation marks, and even gets the beginning and end directions right. It's hardly rocket science - why isn't everyone doing this? Curly quotes look so much better, and give an optically pleasing space around the quotation which sets it apart from normal text. Which is what quotation marks are supposed to do...
“This is a quotation” was copied and pasted from Word into Blogger's editor. It just works, because Word does Unicode right.
I guess that means I have to write in Word first, then copy and paste here. Seems a shame. Takes the "instant post" factor out of blogging. But I'd rather do that than put up with ugly quotes.
Spelling Bee
I'm not like those French academicians who believe language should never change, and want to ban "invasions from other languages" like Le Weekend. Where would the English language be without words like "curry"?
And even though I'm a Brit (well, Scottish), I can see no earthly use in spelling the word "color" as "colour".
But misusage of words has no excuse - especially when the writers are supposed professional communicators like newspapermen and broadcasters.
So I've started a list on this blog I'm calling "Spelling Bee", to highlight incorrect usage whenever I find it. Call me pompous or pedantic if you like, but you can take the man out of editing, you can't take the editor out of the man.
And even though I'm a Brit (well, Scottish), I can see no earthly use in spelling the word "color" as "colour".
But misusage of words has no excuse - especially when the writers are supposed professional communicators like newspapermen and broadcasters.
So I've started a list on this blog I'm calling "Spelling Bee", to highlight incorrect usage whenever I find it. Call me pompous or pedantic if you like, but you can take the man out of editing, you can't take the editor out of the man.
Misuse of the apostrophe - as in the panel truck I see sometimes driving around Redmond advertising "New Bathroom's Fitted" - remains a Capital Offense.
Monday, January 28, 2008
Welcome to my new blog!
Blogging is supposed to be the future of journalism, writing and publishing.
Here's how the theory goes:
In order to get things going, I've copied over all the relevant postings from my previous blog.
Welcome to the new blog!
Here's how the theory goes:
- Blogging and websites are the “new Gutenberg technology”, democratizing publishing in a way that’s never hitherto been possible.
- The Web has already created a publishing explosion, which will continue to grow.
- Anyone can become a publisher. All you have to do is create a blog and write content.
- No-one will pay for it, so content must be free.
- If bloggers’ content is good enough, they will build readership.
- They can establish an income by signing up to have advertising streamed to their site.
- They can also sign up to revenue-sharing schemes such as that run by Amazon (which offers 10% commission on referred sales).
- Few commercial publishers will survive the transition.
In order to get things going, I've copied over all the relevant postings from my previous blog.
Welcome to the new blog!
Welcome to my new blog!
I've been blogging for a few months now, and wanted to try out an experiment.
If blogging is the future of journalism and publishing, then how can people earn a living from it?
The theory is that if your blog attracts readers, then advertisers will pay to show them relevant ads.
So I've set up this new blog, in which I signed up to have advertising streamed to it. Since I read so much, and books have played such a key role in my thinking (and my life), it also seemed to make sense to add a place to share my favorite books and a link to Amazon so you can buy them if you're interested.
We'll see exactly how this all turns out, and I'll share my experiences with you.
In order to get things started, I've copied all the posts from my previous blog onto this one - which is why all the posts have the same date. I'm not that prolific a writer!
bill
.
The Future of Newspapers
When I was a young newspaper reporter in Scotland, back in the 1960s, old-timers had a great put-down for any youngster who got too full of himself/herself after filing what they thought was a particularly good story:
"Son, they'll be wrapping fish and chips in that tomorrow!"
And it was true, of course. The traditional Glasgow "fish supper", bought from the local "chippie", (which means a fish-and-chip shop in Scotland), was so swimming in deep-frying grease you needed something to absorb it. Glasgow and the West of Scotland was known back then as the Heart Disease Capital Of The World...
I love newspapers. Good ones, like the Scotsman (for which I worked for 12 years), or its Scottish quality competitor, the Glasgow Herald - or the New York Times, Washington Post, and so on - do an amazing job of monitoring a huge amount of news every day, checking it, focusing on what's most important, writing it in a way that's readable, and laying it out with good typography, photos and so on.
The news organizations they've all built over the years are amazing, but cost a fortune to run.
Anyone who believes all information should be free should be forced to take a walk through a busy newspaper editorial department about an hour before edition time...
Anyway, much as I love newspapers, the "paper" part of what they do is an anachronism that surely can't survive the Digital Age. The number of trees that have to be cut down and pulped just to satisfy one day's demand is insane, in a world of global warming. Within a few years we're going to need every tree on the planet just so we can breathe...
I know there are issues with the resources the computing industry uses, but it is becoming more conscious of them and beginning to do something about them.
I'd like to see good news organizations survive by adapting, and creating a successful online business model for news.
Reading on the Web is still nowhere near as good as it can or should be. I'm not the only one who believes that; it's clear from the evolution of Web standards like Cascading Style Sheets that many people feel the need of better typography and more sophisticated layout. See the CSS 2.1 spec at:
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/
There's a lot that needs to happen in addition to better layout. Layout needs to become adaptive, so I can read on any device and still get the best-possible experience.
And scrolling's still a horrible thing to do to someone who's trying to read.
The geeks who invented the Web and the first browser at NSCA hadn't a clue about readability. I remember back then; the "Model T" option - "You can have any typeface you want, as long as it's Times..."
Putting text into a bottomless window through which readers could scroll was done merely because it was the easiest option - a lot easier than doing the right thing, which was paginated content in a multi-column layout.
But just because it's easy, that doesn't mean we should have to live with substandard readability until the end of time.
This page is a great example. To read this, you're scrolling down a single column of text - and most of the display shows nothing but white space.
We also need to be able to read our "newspaper" when we're offline. We need to be able to manage all the different "subscriptions" we'll have. I'd like the New York Times, Newsweek, The Economist, The Scotsman (for sentimental reasons and to see what's going on back there), MSDN magazine, and probably quite a few other publications.
The best implementation of an onscreen newspaper I've seen so far is the New York Times Reader, built on the Windows Presentation Foundation graphics which shipped with Windows Vista (and also runs on Windows XP).
The English Daily Mail and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have also done WPF-based readers. You can find them on their websites.
The WPF team has just released a Software Development Kit which anyone can use to build a reader of their own. There's also source code for a Microsoft Developer Network magazine reader, and a Subscription Center application where you can manage your subscriptions.
See my colleague Tim Sneath's blog for details and pointers to all of this.
http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2008/01/16/we-ve-released-the-news-reader-sdk.aspx#comments
These WPF readers synchronize news at regular intervals and cache it, so you always have an edition you can read offline. The NYT Reader even keeps a seven-day archive for you.
I use the NYT reader almost every day. Sometimes, I read on my Tablet PC in landscape mode, sometimes in portrait mode. The layout adapts beautifully whichever I choose, to give me the best layout. But it doesn't work on my cellphone - which is often the place I'm most likely to read the news.
These readers also support advertising. There's not much expertise out there yet in building WPF-based adaptive ads, but the concept is very powerful, and promises much higher quality adverts - which also means more revenue for publishers. So maybe "newspapers" and "magazines", at least, can support their content creation staffs and systems with advertising, which would allow free content.
I still can't see an advertising model that works for books.
Having said all these positive things about WPF-based readers, you still have to have a pretty good software engineer or two to create one from the source code that's provided.
What about the rest of us who're not programmers and just want to put content on the Web? The power of Desktop Publishing, which appeared in the mid-80s - I was there - was that it opened up the power of quality publishing to far more people.
The Web needs to evolve to support similar standards of readability, offline experience, adaptive layout, etc., and allow anyone to create content.
The CSS 2.1 flurry of activity was sparked by people who saw the NYT Reader, and asked "How can we do this on the Web?"
We're not there yet, even with CSS 2.1. But within a few years we will be, if I have anything to do with it :-)
"Son, they'll be wrapping fish and chips in that tomorrow!"
And it was true, of course. The traditional Glasgow "fish supper", bought from the local "chippie", (which means a fish-and-chip shop in Scotland), was so swimming in deep-frying grease you needed something to absorb it. Glasgow and the West of Scotland was known back then as the Heart Disease Capital Of The World...
I love newspapers. Good ones, like the Scotsman (for which I worked for 12 years), or its Scottish quality competitor, the Glasgow Herald - or the New York Times, Washington Post, and so on - do an amazing job of monitoring a huge amount of news every day, checking it, focusing on what's most important, writing it in a way that's readable, and laying it out with good typography, photos and so on.
The news organizations they've all built over the years are amazing, but cost a fortune to run.
Anyone who believes all information should be free should be forced to take a walk through a busy newspaper editorial department about an hour before edition time...
Anyway, much as I love newspapers, the "paper" part of what they do is an anachronism that surely can't survive the Digital Age. The number of trees that have to be cut down and pulped just to satisfy one day's demand is insane, in a world of global warming. Within a few years we're going to need every tree on the planet just so we can breathe...
I know there are issues with the resources the computing industry uses, but it is becoming more conscious of them and beginning to do something about them.
I'd like to see good news organizations survive by adapting, and creating a successful online business model for news.
Reading on the Web is still nowhere near as good as it can or should be. I'm not the only one who believes that; it's clear from the evolution of Web standards like Cascading Style Sheets that many people feel the need of better typography and more sophisticated layout. See the CSS 2.1 spec at:
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/
There's a lot that needs to happen in addition to better layout. Layout needs to become adaptive, so I can read on any device and still get the best-possible experience.
And scrolling's still a horrible thing to do to someone who's trying to read.
The geeks who invented the Web and the first browser at NSCA hadn't a clue about readability. I remember back then; the "Model T" option - "You can have any typeface you want, as long as it's Times..."
Putting text into a bottomless window through which readers could scroll was done merely because it was the easiest option - a lot easier than doing the right thing, which was paginated content in a multi-column layout.
But just because it's easy, that doesn't mean we should have to live with substandard readability until the end of time.
This page is a great example. To read this, you're scrolling down a single column of text - and most of the display shows nothing but white space.
We also need to be able to read our "newspaper" when we're offline. We need to be able to manage all the different "subscriptions" we'll have. I'd like the New York Times, Newsweek, The Economist, The Scotsman (for sentimental reasons and to see what's going on back there), MSDN magazine, and probably quite a few other publications.
The best implementation of an onscreen newspaper I've seen so far is the New York Times Reader, built on the Windows Presentation Foundation graphics which shipped with Windows Vista (and also runs on Windows XP).
The English Daily Mail and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have also done WPF-based readers. You can find them on their websites.
The WPF team has just released a Software Development Kit which anyone can use to build a reader of their own. There's also source code for a Microsoft Developer Network magazine reader, and a Subscription Center application where you can manage your subscriptions.
See my colleague Tim Sneath's blog for details and pointers to all of this.
http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2008/01/16/we-ve-released-the-news-reader-sdk.aspx#comments
These WPF readers synchronize news at regular intervals and cache it, so you always have an edition you can read offline. The NYT Reader even keeps a seven-day archive for you.
I use the NYT reader almost every day. Sometimes, I read on my Tablet PC in landscape mode, sometimes in portrait mode. The layout adapts beautifully whichever I choose, to give me the best layout. But it doesn't work on my cellphone - which is often the place I'm most likely to read the news.
These readers also support advertising. There's not much expertise out there yet in building WPF-based adaptive ads, but the concept is very powerful, and promises much higher quality adverts - which also means more revenue for publishers. So maybe "newspapers" and "magazines", at least, can support their content creation staffs and systems with advertising, which would allow free content.
I still can't see an advertising model that works for books.
Having said all these positive things about WPF-based readers, you still have to have a pretty good software engineer or two to create one from the source code that's provided.
What about the rest of us who're not programmers and just want to put content on the Web? The power of Desktop Publishing, which appeared in the mid-80s - I was there - was that it opened up the power of quality publishing to far more people.
The Web needs to evolve to support similar standards of readability, offline experience, adaptive layout, etc., and allow anyone to create content.
The CSS 2.1 flurry of activity was sparked by people who saw the NYT Reader, and asked "How can we do this on the Web?"
We're not there yet, even with CSS 2.1. But within a few years we will be, if I have anything to do with it :-)
Kindle: A Little Spark - but not setting the world on fire yet...
I wanted to give the Amazon Kindle a fair trial before I wrote about it, rather than just jumping in with a collection of first impressions.
What's a fair trial? Well, reading at least one whole book on the device would do for a start.
There are good things about the Kindle - some very good. And there are bad things, too - some very bad.
Can you read whole books on it? Yes, if you're prepared to put up with some discomfort and learn to work around some of what's worst. I wouldn't hail it as a breakthrough in onscreen reading. But it's not a total bomb either.
First impressions are of a very cheaply-made white plastic toy. And why would I ever want a keyboard on a book? It takes up space which would have been better used in making the screen bigger, thus reducing the number of page turns (which are one of my main gripes about all of the eInk reading devices to have appeared over the past year or two - more on this later).
The Kindle looks a lot better and feels a lot more substantial once it's cradled in its leatherette cover; it looks and feels like one of those nice Moleskin notebooks.
It's easy to get started. Plug it in, and away you go.
I happened to be somewhere that was out of range of Amazon's Kindle-supporting network - which meant I couldn't use it to buy a book. So I used my laptop to go online to Amazon.com and buy "Born Standing Up", the autobiography of comedian Steve Martin.
I bought the book, but it didn't download to my PC and into the Kindle through the (supplied) USB cable, as I'd expected. So I took the Kindle in the car when I went on a shopping trip to a nearby town. Lo and behold! As soon as I switched it on, it woke up, connected to the network, and automatically downloaded the book I'd purchased earlier. I'm sure if I'd been in network range the experience would have been even better...
You'd expect Amazon to do a good job of creating an excellent book-buying experience, and they didn't disappoint.
This is hands-down the best eBook buying experience I've seen yet.
Reading the book was very jarring, especially in the beginning. Page turns are horrible, as a result of the eInk technology. Every time you turn a page, the screen flashes a negative image first (white text on a black background) before settling to the correct black-on-white. Not only that, but the huge page-turn "paddles" down each side of the book are far too easy to hit by mistake, causing unwanted and distracting page turns.
I've heard the views of colleagues who have used similar eInk devices and say you get used to the "flashing pages", and they "just disappear" as the process becomes familiar, but I don't buy that.
When you turn the page of a paper book, in most cases you're holding a unit of meaning in short-term memory; any distraction at that time interrupts your ability to flow smoothly through the content.
It's not just the flashing that's the problem; the page turns take far too long - especially if there's a graphic or photograph on the following page. I'd like to see a reading research project look at this and its effect on reading speed and comprehension.
eInk has been promising both faster refresh rates and support for color for many years. I don't know about color, but I suspect that on refresh rates, the manufacturers have run up against a solid wall in the shape of the laws of physics.
I'm sure you all know the principle on which eInk operates: the screen consists of a layer of millions of tiny balls which are black on one side and white on the other. A static charge is applied to line up some of the balls with black facing out, the rest with white facing out - and you get "black" text on a "white" background.
Problem is, that while this may look like an "electrical process", in reality, it depends on mechanically turning the balls. And no matter how hard you try, you're bound to hit physical limitations caused by the laws of inertia and friction.
Maybe I'm wrong, but this looks to me like a technology that's not quite good enough, and can't be made better - unlike other screen technologies, which continue to improve.
While I'm on the subject of graphics, Amazon has done an especially poor job of displaying graphics and pictures on the Kindle. It supports too few levels of gray. Photos look like the kind of gray blur you used to see on computer screens 20 years ago. Reproduction of the photos in the Steve Martin book was uniformly awful.
There's another really fundamental flaw I hate about the Kindle screen. It's meant to show black text on a white background and look like a book. In reality, it reads more like 90% gray text on a 30 or 40% gray background.
Contrast - known as a result of reading research to affect both reading speed and eye fatigue - is poor, unless you're reading in sunlight or bright light indoors.
As an experiment, I held up a paper book alongside the Kindle. In the same light conditions, the paper book had far superior contrast. And don't even think of trying to read your Kindle, Sony Reader or other eInk device in low light - it can't be done.
All that said, you CAN read a whole book on it, if you're prepared to put up with these faults. But why should you have to, when you can do better? I would much rather have read Steve Martin's book on my cellphone. Even the photos, though smaller, would have looked much better.
I know the iRex Iliad, another eInk-based reading device, does a better job of pictures, and I expect the Sony Reader does too. If Amazon had paid the same attention to its display software as it clearly paid to the book-buying software, the result could well have been better.
Maybe this will improve in subsequent versions.
Reading isn't simple. It's a hugely complex task - a really stressful workout for our eyes and the muscles which control them. The book evolved over 550 years to make this as low-impact as possible.
In some respects - buying books, being able to carry your whole library around, etc - the Kindle looks like a step into the future. In others, it's worse than the past. But as I said earlier, it's not a total bomb. I'll probably read more books on it. But only if I can't find versions for my cellphone...
What's a fair trial? Well, reading at least one whole book on the device would do for a start.
There are good things about the Kindle - some very good. And there are bad things, too - some very bad.
Can you read whole books on it? Yes, if you're prepared to put up with some discomfort and learn to work around some of what's worst. I wouldn't hail it as a breakthrough in onscreen reading. But it's not a total bomb either.
First impressions are of a very cheaply-made white plastic toy. And why would I ever want a keyboard on a book? It takes up space which would have been better used in making the screen bigger, thus reducing the number of page turns (which are one of my main gripes about all of the eInk reading devices to have appeared over the past year or two - more on this later).
The Kindle looks a lot better and feels a lot more substantial once it's cradled in its leatherette cover; it looks and feels like one of those nice Moleskin notebooks.
It's easy to get started. Plug it in, and away you go.
I happened to be somewhere that was out of range of Amazon's Kindle-supporting network - which meant I couldn't use it to buy a book. So I used my laptop to go online to Amazon.com and buy "Born Standing Up", the autobiography of comedian Steve Martin.
I bought the book, but it didn't download to my PC and into the Kindle through the (supplied) USB cable, as I'd expected. So I took the Kindle in the car when I went on a shopping trip to a nearby town. Lo and behold! As soon as I switched it on, it woke up, connected to the network, and automatically downloaded the book I'd purchased earlier. I'm sure if I'd been in network range the experience would have been even better...
You'd expect Amazon to do a good job of creating an excellent book-buying experience, and they didn't disappoint.
This is hands-down the best eBook buying experience I've seen yet.
Reading the book was very jarring, especially in the beginning. Page turns are horrible, as a result of the eInk technology. Every time you turn a page, the screen flashes a negative image first (white text on a black background) before settling to the correct black-on-white. Not only that, but the huge page-turn "paddles" down each side of the book are far too easy to hit by mistake, causing unwanted and distracting page turns.
I've heard the views of colleagues who have used similar eInk devices and say you get used to the "flashing pages", and they "just disappear" as the process becomes familiar, but I don't buy that.
When you turn the page of a paper book, in most cases you're holding a unit of meaning in short-term memory; any distraction at that time interrupts your ability to flow smoothly through the content.
It's not just the flashing that's the problem; the page turns take far too long - especially if there's a graphic or photograph on the following page. I'd like to see a reading research project look at this and its effect on reading speed and comprehension.
eInk has been promising both faster refresh rates and support for color for many years. I don't know about color, but I suspect that on refresh rates, the manufacturers have run up against a solid wall in the shape of the laws of physics.
I'm sure you all know the principle on which eInk operates: the screen consists of a layer of millions of tiny balls which are black on one side and white on the other. A static charge is applied to line up some of the balls with black facing out, the rest with white facing out - and you get "black" text on a "white" background.
Problem is, that while this may look like an "electrical process", in reality, it depends on mechanically turning the balls. And no matter how hard you try, you're bound to hit physical limitations caused by the laws of inertia and friction.
Maybe I'm wrong, but this looks to me like a technology that's not quite good enough, and can't be made better - unlike other screen technologies, which continue to improve.
While I'm on the subject of graphics, Amazon has done an especially poor job of displaying graphics and pictures on the Kindle. It supports too few levels of gray. Photos look like the kind of gray blur you used to see on computer screens 20 years ago. Reproduction of the photos in the Steve Martin book was uniformly awful.
There's another really fundamental flaw I hate about the Kindle screen. It's meant to show black text on a white background and look like a book. In reality, it reads more like 90% gray text on a 30 or 40% gray background.
Contrast - known as a result of reading research to affect both reading speed and eye fatigue - is poor, unless you're reading in sunlight or bright light indoors.
As an experiment, I held up a paper book alongside the Kindle. In the same light conditions, the paper book had far superior contrast. And don't even think of trying to read your Kindle, Sony Reader or other eInk device in low light - it can't be done.
All that said, you CAN read a whole book on it, if you're prepared to put up with these faults. But why should you have to, when you can do better? I would much rather have read Steve Martin's book on my cellphone. Even the photos, though smaller, would have looked much better.
I know the iRex Iliad, another eInk-based reading device, does a better job of pictures, and I expect the Sony Reader does too. If Amazon had paid the same attention to its display software as it clearly paid to the book-buying software, the result could well have been better.
Maybe this will improve in subsequent versions.
Reading isn't simple. It's a hugely complex task - a really stressful workout for our eyes and the muscles which control them. The book evolved over 550 years to make this as low-impact as possible.
In some respects - buying books, being able to carry your whole library around, etc - the Kindle looks like a step into the future. In others, it's worse than the past. But as I said earlier, it's not a total bomb. I'll probably read more books on it. But only if I can't find versions for my cellphone...
Every book you'll ever read in your life - in your pocket!
Some more on my continuing love affair with my cellphone as a reading device...
The phone has a MicroSD memory card slot. I couldn't believe the size of the plastic dummy card that came in it. You could probably fit two of them on my thumbnail, and it's not much thicker than a fingernail - about 1mm or less.
I went into the local Verizon store. They had cards in various sizes, from 1Gb at $29.99 to 8Gb at $129.99.
I decided to go the whole hog and buy the 8Gb card. It's unbelievable. And no muss, no fuss - you just plug the card into the slot, the phone recognizes it's there, and you're good to go.
Books in Microsoft Reader format tend to be from 200k to 400K in size, depending on whether the book contains photos or illustrations.
Some quick work with a calculator reveals that at 400K per book, 8Gb lets you store 20,000 books.
If you started reading when you were five years old, and got up to 5 books a week by the time you were 10, you might exhaust your pocket library by the time you reached the age of 85 - and that's all pretty unlikely. Of course if you did, you could just pull out the card and insert another one with the second half of your library on it :-)
And of course the memory capacity of the cards will continue to increase. I can't see cards getting much smaller - this one's already starting to get finicky to handle, and would be the easiest thing in the world to lose if you took it out and set it down somewhere. A strong wind could blow it away...
I'm sure they'll continue to hold more and more.
I recently bought an Amazon Kindle eBook to try. I've written more in detail about that experience in another posting. But I really much prefer my phone for its size, the one-handed operation, screen quality, convenience and backlight (so I can read in bed with the light off).
And with a capacity of 20,000 books or more , it's my entire library in my pocket.
The phone has a MicroSD memory card slot. I couldn't believe the size of the plastic dummy card that came in it. You could probably fit two of them on my thumbnail, and it's not much thicker than a fingernail - about 1mm or less.
I went into the local Verizon store. They had cards in various sizes, from 1Gb at $29.99 to 8Gb at $129.99.
I decided to go the whole hog and buy the 8Gb card. It's unbelievable. And no muss, no fuss - you just plug the card into the slot, the phone recognizes it's there, and you're good to go.
Books in Microsoft Reader format tend to be from 200k to 400K in size, depending on whether the book contains photos or illustrations.
Some quick work with a calculator reveals that at 400K per book, 8Gb lets you store 20,000 books.
If you started reading when you were five years old, and got up to 5 books a week by the time you were 10, you might exhaust your pocket library by the time you reached the age of 85 - and that's all pretty unlikely. Of course if you did, you could just pull out the card and insert another one with the second half of your library on it :-)
And of course the memory capacity of the cards will continue to increase. I can't see cards getting much smaller - this one's already starting to get finicky to handle, and would be the easiest thing in the world to lose if you took it out and set it down somewhere. A strong wind could blow it away...
I'm sure they'll continue to hold more and more.
I recently bought an Amazon Kindle eBook to try. I've written more in detail about that experience in another posting. But I really much prefer my phone for its size, the one-handed operation, screen quality, convenience and backlight (so I can read in bed with the light off).
And with a capacity of 20,000 books or more , it's my entire library in my pocket.
It's Always There!
Yesterday I had to drive to a pharmacy about half an hour away to get a prescription refilled.
Because the pharmacy was open for only a few hours because it was Christmas, it was very busy and I was told I'd have to wait about an hour.
Normally that wouldn't be much fun. But I had my new phone with me. First I called my wife and told her I'd be about an hour later than we'd planned and not to worry.
Then I headed across to a nearby Starbucks, got myself a cup of coffee, at down in a comfortable armchair and started reading.
Three-quarters of an hour later, I walked across to the pharmacy, got the prescription and headed home.
Point of the story? Because my phone is my eBook reader, it's always there. And I can read anywhere, anytime.
"Always-there" more than makes up for the smaller screen.
Because the pharmacy was open for only a few hours because it was Christmas, it was very busy and I was told I'd have to wait about an hour.
Normally that wouldn't be much fun. But I had my new phone with me. First I called my wife and told her I'd be about an hour later than we'd planned and not to worry.
Then I headed across to a nearby Starbucks, got myself a cup of coffee, at down in a comfortable armchair and started reading.
Three-quarters of an hour later, I walked across to the pharmacy, got the prescription and headed home.
Point of the story? Because my phone is my eBook reader, it's always there. And I can read anywhere, anytime.
"Always-there" more than makes up for the smaller screen.
My Favorite New Reading Device
I just got a new favorite device for reading onscreen, especially books.
Funny thing is, I didn't set out in the first place to buy any kind of eBook reading device. I set out to buy a phone. I never thought a device with a typical phone-sized screen would work for reading books - but I love it.
When my telephone landline packed up at the end of last week, and the automated repair system of my telecom provider informed me it would take several days to fix, I decided it was time to cave in and buy a cellphone again.
I've had cellphones before, of course, but not for a few years. I got tired of being that available, and carrying yet another device around.
However, not wanting to be totally intelecommunicado (that's a nice new word!) for that long, I visited the local mall. I looked at all the phones and plumped for the Verizon VX6800 (made by HTC).
I liked the phone. As well as being a stylish phone, it has a slide-out keyboard, great Internet access, and a nice high-res screen.
It's a Windows Mobile 6 device. So I decided to go ahead and download Microsoft Reader to it. I worked on Reader for a number of years, and I think that despite its shortcomings, once you are actually reading a book it's the best eBook experience so far.
I've surprised myself before with small devices. My previous favorite device for reading eBooks was a Dell Axim 50v PocketPC with a 208ppi screen. With Clearype on it, the text is better than most print.
As a really heavy-duty test, I read the entire 6 volumes of Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" on it. Never mind eBooks - that's a Black Belt 10th Dan reading test for a paper book, pretty heavy going! If you can read that on a device, you can read anything...
Well, I installed Reader, which includes four weights of the sans serif font, Frutiger Linotype, which my friends and colleagues Mike Duggan and Geraldine Wade had expertly created and hinted.
When we first built Reader for PocketPC, we opted for a sans serif font because a serif font seemed a little too constrained on the small screens of the first PocketPCs, which were around 110ppi.
For reading on a desktop or laptop display, Mike and Geraldine had created a new and great version of the classic Swedish serif face, Berling. Turned out Berling worked great on the high-res screen of the Dell. I haven't got around to trying it on my new phone yet, but I plan to.
Anyway, I found the phone is perhaps my ideal device for reading books which are almost all or totally text.
You'd think the small screen would be annoying, because you don't get that much text on it, and so there are a lot of page turns. But since you can turn the pages quickly with your thumb, it's not intrusive.
I just love the size of this device. It really fits in your pocket. But the best thing of all is, everything I need while on the move is on one small device.
I'm not the only one to realize the benefits of reading books on your cellphone. My longtime colleague and eBook collaborator Mike Cooper recently sent around results of a survey which found that the phone segment was the fastest-growing segment of eBook sales.
I have some thoughts on how to make my new phone even better for reading, so I'm going to work with the Windows Mobile team.
Funny thing is, I didn't set out in the first place to buy any kind of eBook reading device. I set out to buy a phone. I never thought a device with a typical phone-sized screen would work for reading books - but I love it.
When my telephone landline packed up at the end of last week, and the automated repair system of my telecom provider informed me it would take several days to fix, I decided it was time to cave in and buy a cellphone again.
I've had cellphones before, of course, but not for a few years. I got tired of being that available, and carrying yet another device around.
However, not wanting to be totally intelecommunicado (that's a nice new word!) for that long, I visited the local mall. I looked at all the phones and plumped for the Verizon VX6800 (made by HTC).
I liked the phone. As well as being a stylish phone, it has a slide-out keyboard, great Internet access, and a nice high-res screen.
It's a Windows Mobile 6 device. So I decided to go ahead and download Microsoft Reader to it. I worked on Reader for a number of years, and I think that despite its shortcomings, once you are actually reading a book it's the best eBook experience so far.
I've surprised myself before with small devices. My previous favorite device for reading eBooks was a Dell Axim 50v PocketPC with a 208ppi screen. With Clearype on it, the text is better than most print.
As a really heavy-duty test, I read the entire 6 volumes of Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" on it. Never mind eBooks - that's a Black Belt 10th Dan reading test for a paper book, pretty heavy going! If you can read that on a device, you can read anything...
Well, I installed Reader, which includes four weights of the sans serif font, Frutiger Linotype, which my friends and colleagues Mike Duggan and Geraldine Wade had expertly created and hinted.
When we first built Reader for PocketPC, we opted for a sans serif font because a serif font seemed a little too constrained on the small screens of the first PocketPCs, which were around 110ppi.
For reading on a desktop or laptop display, Mike and Geraldine had created a new and great version of the classic Swedish serif face, Berling. Turned out Berling worked great on the high-res screen of the Dell. I haven't got around to trying it on my new phone yet, but I plan to.
Anyway, I found the phone is perhaps my ideal device for reading books which are almost all or totally text.
You'd think the small screen would be annoying, because you don't get that much text on it, and so there are a lot of page turns. But since you can turn the pages quickly with your thumb, it's not intrusive.
I just love the size of this device. It really fits in your pocket. But the best thing of all is, everything I need while on the move is on one small device.
I'm not the only one to realize the benefits of reading books on your cellphone. My longtime colleague and eBook collaborator Mike Cooper recently sent around results of a survey which found that the phone segment was the fastest-growing segment of eBook sales.
I have some thoughts on how to make my new phone even better for reading, so I'm going to work with the Windows Mobile team.
Information is Free?
I think the Web - and especially all the information that's out there for free - is wonderful. But it does worry me that we're developing a generation which thinks that everything is free - songs, music, books, etc.
I spent 20 years writing for a living, back in Scotland. I needed to get paid for my work, since I had a family to support and a mortgage to pay.
My old friend Peter May is a writer. We worked together in the Scotsman newspaper back in the 1970s. Eventually, he left to fulfil his ambition of writing books, and I left to help set up the European operation of Aldus Corporation, whose PageMaker desktop publishing application pretty much established that market. I eventually moved to the USA to work for Microsoft, while he bought a farmhouse in the Dordogne in France.
Peter writes detective/thriller stories, and he's been successful enough to support himself all those years.
But what would have happened if instead of publishing printed books, he'd written on the Web? How would he have ever gotten paid?
People often argue that "free" content leads people to buy more. That's a real crock. If you look at the effect on sales of music CDs when a whole generation gets its music for free, and the fact that paid-for music downloads have nowhere near filled the revenue gap, you can see we're headed for trouble.
Or take an example closer to home. In his latest book "Stick To Drawing Comics, Monkey-Brain!", Scott Adams, hugely successful creator of the "Dilbert" comic strip, details what happened when he made a free copy of one of his books online after it had been in print fore five years, in the hope this would stimulate demand for the follow-up.
About 500,000 people downloaded the title from the Web. Only around a thousand ever went on the buy the sequel.
Guess what Scott Adams' preferred book-publishing medium is for the foreseeable future? Print, of course!
This is a problem we have to solve sooner or later. How can people who write on the Web get fairly paid for their endeavors?
Advertising's one possible answer. But it's hard to see how that can support any reading material that's longer than individual articles.
I spent 20 years writing for a living, back in Scotland. I needed to get paid for my work, since I had a family to support and a mortgage to pay.
My old friend Peter May is a writer. We worked together in the Scotsman newspaper back in the 1970s. Eventually, he left to fulfil his ambition of writing books, and I left to help set up the European operation of Aldus Corporation, whose PageMaker desktop publishing application pretty much established that market. I eventually moved to the USA to work for Microsoft, while he bought a farmhouse in the Dordogne in France.
Peter writes detective/thriller stories, and he's been successful enough to support himself all those years.
But what would have happened if instead of publishing printed books, he'd written on the Web? How would he have ever gotten paid?
People often argue that "free" content leads people to buy more. That's a real crock. If you look at the effect on sales of music CDs when a whole generation gets its music for free, and the fact that paid-for music downloads have nowhere near filled the revenue gap, you can see we're headed for trouble.
Or take an example closer to home. In his latest book "Stick To Drawing Comics, Monkey-Brain!", Scott Adams, hugely successful creator of the "Dilbert" comic strip, details what happened when he made a free copy of one of his books online after it had been in print fore five years, in the hope this would stimulate demand for the follow-up.
About 500,000 people downloaded the title from the Web. Only around a thousand ever went on the buy the sequel.
Guess what Scott Adams' preferred book-publishing medium is for the foreseeable future? Print, of course!
This is a problem we have to solve sooner or later. How can people who write on the Web get fairly paid for their endeavors?
Advertising's one possible answer. But it's hard to see how that can support any reading material that's longer than individual articles.
Make Great Fonts for Reading Onscreen
I've told you in an early posting in this blog how even while working for Aldus in Europe I noticed the great leap forward Microsoft had made in creating fonts for the screen.
Times New Roman, Arial and Courier New were the Core Fonts created for Windows 3.1. I've since learned a lot more about that project. It took a team of 18 people working for about three years to figure out how to use the power of the TrueType language to hint them for the screen and integrate TrueType into Windows.
Even though they were the best screen fonts I'd seen so far, they were still far from ideal. Times New Roman, which has to be the most-used font on the planet, since it was also the default font in Microsoft Word until Office 2007, is a very traditional face which works well in print (although definitely showing its age now) but is not very good onscreen because of its small x-height.
The ratio of x-height to the height of capital letters (cap-height, of course) is very important. If you have two passages of type set in different faces in 12point, and one typeface has a larger x-height, it will look much bigger).
I joined Microsoft in January 1995. At that time, when I mentioned my goal of making reading much better onscreen, the typical reaction was, "Why bother? No-one will ever read from a screen anyway. They'll print out whatever they want to read".
But 1995 was the year the Web went mainstream. The first project I commissioned in my new job was to ask Matthew Carter, one of the leading type designers in the world, to create two new faces specifically for reading large passages of text on a screen.
We asked Matthew for a serif and a sans serif face. We got Georgia and Verdana. The Verdana project has already been in existence, but it had been intended only for text in menus and dialogs, not for sustained reading. We changed the requirements, asked Matthew if he felt confident he could meet the "improve sustained reading" goal, and got started.
One of Verdana's identifying characteristics is a large x-height. Another is the wide default spacing between letters - we found that spacing was just as important as character shape in creating readability.
We shipped Verdana and Georgia first in Internet Explorer (PC and Macintosh), then with every copy of Windows and Office.
Verdana changed the Web. It's everywhere.
However, it's no longer the best font for reading onscreen (except perhaps in the strict black-and-white case).
In 1998, we invented ClearType. It improved the display of all fonts. But as we developed it more we realized that, with our understanding of how ClearType manipulated the RGB color sub-pixels, we could use what we'd learned to create even better type for the screen.
I'm typing this blog in Calibri, one of the new family of "ClearType optimized" faces we shipped with Windows Vista and Office 2007. (All the names begin with "C")
We needed new designs. So we went out to the world's top type designers and announced a competition. We'd pick the six best designs, and commission the creation of full versions, which would ship with Windows and other major Microsoft products.
Calibri is my personal favorite. Cambria is a great new serif typeface, and we built that with a whole set of 4000 mathematics characters.
When combined with a new math. composition engine which ships with Word 2007, it allows for the creation of even better math composition than TeX, but in WYSIWYG.
The math composition engine was the baby of Murray Sargent, a physicist who works in Microsoft's RichEdit team. We supported that project with the new font.
Another major font project we did for Vista was a new Japanese font, also designed for onscreen readability.
If you think it's hard designing Latin-language fonts for the screen, try Japanese. Japanese eyes are the same as every other human.
Their fovea dictates they need to read type at about 10.5 points (equivalent to about 11 or 12 points in Western type since the outlines sit on a different matrix).
But on the screen at that size you don't have nearly enough pixels to accurately create all the strokes of a kanji character like utsu, which has eight horizontal strokes.
So you have to reduce the number of strokes in the glyph - but leaving it still able to be recognized as the same character.
In the past, this was done by having a skilled Japanese typographer design a bitmap for every character - typically, for every size between 7 and 22 point. That meant someone had to create about 400,000 bitmaps, and that made the creation of a new Japanese typeface suitable for the screen into a 50 man-year job!
Our project started out with the codename of "Verdana-J", but was later renamed Meiryo.
We worked with Japanese typographer Eichii Kono. The project was managed by Geraldine Wade of the ClearType team. Mike Duggan of the same team was also deeply involved.
Another problem with Japanese text is that kanji characters are often mixed with Latins (usually English).
In the past, these two languages clashed like crazy. Typically, in most Japanese faces the Latins were something of an afterthought, often with poor outlines. Worse still, since Latin text is set on a baseline and there's no concept of that in Japanese (which was traditionally used for vertical writing) there was no harmony.
We called back Matthew Carter, and he and Eichii worked to harmonize the Japanese and Latin.
The result is the best onscreen Japanese I've ever seen. Meiryo has now won awards in Japan for its innovation.
Better still; instead of using bitmaps to do the stroke reduction, we innovated by using the TrueType hinting language. result was that we not only finished the project within budget and in only 18 months (well done, Geraldine!) but we passed on the new techniques we'd invented to the Windows International Fonts team, who used the same procedure to improve the Chinese and Korean fonts we sipped with Vista.
We'd taken a bold gamble with Meiryo, that we could really do something new. To get funding for it, I'd had to go face-to-face with Bill Gates and argue the case (by some fluke, I once found myself with BillG as my manager's manager. I keep a copy of the Microsoft orgchart of the time - the one produced by the Redmond-based Microsoft watchers, Directions on Microsoft - just for sentimental reasons. Two org steps from The Man - it was a once-in-a-lifetime shot, and it'll never happen again...)
Bill gets type, and gets reading onscreen. Over the years, Microsoft has invested huge amounts of time and money in text. He signed off on the project, and he was delighted with the end result.
When I say Bill gets type, I'm not joking. I've come home from the movies on a Saturday night to find email from Bill asking me about support for ligatures in Microsoft products...
Bad news when the man at the top knows that much about your job - nowhere to hide!
What Kind of World Do We Want?
Gutenberg's technology was like an undersea earthquake. No-one felt much at first, but it created a tsunami of change that swept the planet.
The Renaissance would not have happened without it. The power of an autocratic church was broken, and science and technology accelerated, largely because it became possible to question dogma.
It also spawned the Age of Enlightenment, in which thinkers questioned the wealth of nations and how they were governed.
On St. Valentine's Day, 1776, one of those thinkers, Thomas Paine, said:
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now.The birthday of a new world is at hand.”
The group of thinkers and politicians to which Paine belonged then asked the obvious question: "If we have the chance to build a new world, what kind of world do we want to create?"
A few months later, they signed the Declaration of Independence, a document with lofty goals which are still not fully realized more than 200 years later, but served as a beacon for the development of democracy.
The world is being re-created again today by the Internet. We're really just at the beginning of what historians writing 500 years from now will call The Digital Renaissance, and the words of Thomas Paine are as valid today as they were in 1776.
So, what kind of world do we want to create?
I updated the Declaration of Independence for the Age of the Web. I think this is the kind of world we want. It won't be achieved tomorrow; it may take 50, 100 or even 200 years. It raises lots of questions, like how do people in less-developed countries get access?
But I think it's a goal towards which we should all strive.
The Digital Declaration of Independence:
We hold this truth to be self-evident: That every human has an equal and unalienable right to the means to create, distribute and consume information to realize their full potential for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness - regardless of the country they live in, their gender, beliefs, racial origin, language or any impairments they may have.
The Renaissance would not have happened without it. The power of an autocratic church was broken, and science and technology accelerated, largely because it became possible to question dogma.
It also spawned the Age of Enlightenment, in which thinkers questioned the wealth of nations and how they were governed.
On St. Valentine's Day, 1776, one of those thinkers, Thomas Paine, said:
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now.The birthday of a new world is at hand.”
The group of thinkers and politicians to which Paine belonged then asked the obvious question: "If we have the chance to build a new world, what kind of world do we want to create?"
A few months later, they signed the Declaration of Independence, a document with lofty goals which are still not fully realized more than 200 years later, but served as a beacon for the development of democracy.
The world is being re-created again today by the Internet. We're really just at the beginning of what historians writing 500 years from now will call The Digital Renaissance, and the words of Thomas Paine are as valid today as they were in 1776.
So, what kind of world do we want to create?
I updated the Declaration of Independence for the Age of the Web. I think this is the kind of world we want. It won't be achieved tomorrow; it may take 50, 100 or even 200 years. It raises lots of questions, like how do people in less-developed countries get access?
But I think it's a goal towards which we should all strive.
The Digital Declaration of Independence:
We hold this truth to be self-evident: That every human has an equal and unalienable right to the means to create, distribute and consume information to realize their full potential for Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness - regardless of the country they live in, their gender, beliefs, racial origin, language or any impairments they may have.
Text alignment experiment
When we read, we don't have to think about recognizing the shapes of letters or words. We don't have to think about jumping to the next line when we reach the end of the one we're currently on. The process needs to take place automatically, below our conscious cognitive level, and good text is set up to allow that to happen.
Paragraph 1. 550 years of text mutation has taught us how to compose text so the human visual system can read it as easily and comfortably as possible. One of the techniques that really helps is to justify columns of text. It's much easier for the eye and brain to tell when they've reached the end of a line if that always occurs in the same place. But there are problems with doing this on the Web.
Paragraph 2. 550 years of text mutation has taught us how to compose text so the human visual system can read it as easily and comfortably as possible. One of the techniques that really helps is to justify columns of text. It's much easier for the eye and brain to tell when they've reached the end of a line if that always occurs in the same place. But there are problems with doing this on the Web.
Repeating the same text was deliberate. The first example's set "aligned left", the second's justified. And here's the problem with doing it on the Web. It's very subtle, so you'll have to bear with me.
(My writing style makes it hard to show this dramatically. As a former journalist, I tend to use plain language and short sentences, so there are not too many long words or technical terms).
Justification should make text easier to read, according to the theory. So how come Paragraph 2 - the justified one - somehow feels a lot less comfortable?
There are some subtle things going on here. Justifying text means you have to evenly distribute the spaces between the words. And that means word-spacing varies from line to line. In my writing style, it doesn't vary by very much. But even that little is enough to interfere with the scanning rhythm.
How this is fixed in print is by hyphenating words to keep word-spacing more constant. It doesn't need to be exactly the same on each line, as long as it doesn't vary by too much.
At the same time, with all the lines of equal length, typographers have found it's a good idea to insert a small indent in the first line of each paragraph. And that means you don't need space between paragraphs - which not only saves space but eliminates all the "two-line reverse saccades" needed to get to the start of each paragraph.
The Web supports justification. But no-one's doing hyphenation on justified text- so no-one uses it. They may not understand why they don't like it, because the differences are subtle, as I said. But they don't.
It's like art. We may not know about it, but we know what we like. Even if we know nothing about type or text, our automatic scanning system knows the difference between good and bad.
A few years ago, my friends in the ClearType group and I showed Bill Gates two example pages: one well-set, the other other badly-set.
"It's obvious this one's better," Bill said, "but why is that? We need to put a lot more science into this".
There wasn't much good reading research going on at that time - especially into reading on the screen. We hunted around for people who could execute research projects for us, and realized there were no real "centers of excellence".
How these normally happen is that a professor or senior researcher gets interested in a particular topic. They get funding for research, and start some projects. Their graduate students help as part of their studies. Then they get interested, and develop some expertise. Often, they end up as full-time researchers working in the same department in which they studied. And then you get a body of experts in one place - a center of excellence.
We set about trying to help grow some new centers of excellence in reading research by providing funding. We hired a cognitive psychologist, Dr. Kevin Larson, to run the program. Kevin still works in the ClearType and Readability Research group at Microsoft (they're part of the Windows team). He's done fantastic work, and we now have plenty of universities who can do this work, in areas like ophthalmology, eye-tracking, modeling the human visual system, and so on, and we have an ongoing research program.
The illustrations in my blog were provided by Kevin.
Kevin's helped us put a lot more science behind the Mystery of Reading,
Paragraph 1. 550 years of text mutation has taught us how to compose text so the human visual system can read it as easily and comfortably as possible. One of the techniques that really helps is to justify columns of text. It's much easier for the eye and brain to tell when they've reached the end of a line if that always occurs in the same place. But there are problems with doing this on the Web.
Paragraph 2. 550 years of text mutation has taught us how to compose text so the human visual system can read it as easily and comfortably as possible. One of the techniques that really helps is to justify columns of text. It's much easier for the eye and brain to tell when they've reached the end of a line if that always occurs in the same place. But there are problems with doing this on the Web.
Repeating the same text was deliberate. The first example's set "aligned left", the second's justified. And here's the problem with doing it on the Web. It's very subtle, so you'll have to bear with me.
(My writing style makes it hard to show this dramatically. As a former journalist, I tend to use plain language and short sentences, so there are not too many long words or technical terms).
Justification should make text easier to read, according to the theory. So how come Paragraph 2 - the justified one - somehow feels a lot less comfortable?
There are some subtle things going on here. Justifying text means you have to evenly distribute the spaces between the words. And that means word-spacing varies from line to line. In my writing style, it doesn't vary by very much. But even that little is enough to interfere with the scanning rhythm.
How this is fixed in print is by hyphenating words to keep word-spacing more constant. It doesn't need to be exactly the same on each line, as long as it doesn't vary by too much.
At the same time, with all the lines of equal length, typographers have found it's a good idea to insert a small indent in the first line of each paragraph. And that means you don't need space between paragraphs - which not only saves space but eliminates all the "two-line reverse saccades" needed to get to the start of each paragraph.
The Web supports justification. But no-one's doing hyphenation on justified text- so no-one uses it. They may not understand why they don't like it, because the differences are subtle, as I said. But they don't.
It's like art. We may not know about it, but we know what we like. Even if we know nothing about type or text, our automatic scanning system knows the difference between good and bad.
A few years ago, my friends in the ClearType group and I showed Bill Gates two example pages: one well-set, the other other badly-set.
"It's obvious this one's better," Bill said, "but why is that? We need to put a lot more science into this".
There wasn't much good reading research going on at that time - especially into reading on the screen. We hunted around for people who could execute research projects for us, and realized there were no real "centers of excellence".
How these normally happen is that a professor or senior researcher gets interested in a particular topic. They get funding for research, and start some projects. Their graduate students help as part of their studies. Then they get interested, and develop some expertise. Often, they end up as full-time researchers working in the same department in which they studied. And then you get a body of experts in one place - a center of excellence.
We set about trying to help grow some new centers of excellence in reading research by providing funding. We hired a cognitive psychologist, Dr. Kevin Larson, to run the program. Kevin still works in the ClearType and Readability Research group at Microsoft (they're part of the Windows team). He's done fantastic work, and we now have plenty of universities who can do this work, in areas like ophthalmology, eye-tracking, modeling the human visual system, and so on, and we have an ongoing research program.
The illustrations in my blog were provided by Kevin.
Kevin's helped us put a lot more science behind the Mystery of Reading,
Scrolling: A horrible thing to do to humans who're trying to read...
For hundreds of years, designers of books, magazines and newspapers have been evolving text to make it as readable as possible.
It wasn't scientifically planned in the beginning. What worked, survived over the centuries, and what didn't work died. Darwinian evolution.
Although it wasn't scientifically planned, science can explain the evolution in terms of the human visual system.
A huge body of work on the readability of text was developed by two US university researchers in the years from 1929 until about the mid-1960s. They were Miles Tinker and his colleague Donald Paterson.
By as early as 1940, they'd carried out speed of reading and comprehension tests on more than 33,000 research subjects.
Although their findings were based on text in print, the same readability parameters apply equally to the screen - with a few adjustments.
Tinker and Paterson found reading only became comfortable when the text was at least 9 points high. (A point is the traditional printers' measure, = 1/72 inch).
Readability improved at 10 point, got better still at 11 point, dropped off very slightly at 12, and fell off sharply beyond 13 point.
They also found that readers read most comfortably when columns of text were between 55 and 65 characters wide at those sizes.
Interestingly enough, the team I was then running at Microsoft funded a university research project which initially puzzled us until I realized that we humans will trade efficiency for comfort.
Mary Dyson and her team at the University of Reading in the UK found that reading was actually more efficient with wider columns, (~100 characters), but that people still preferred the narrower measure.
This surprising finding - and those of Tinker and Paterson, can be explained once you look at the human eye. 
The picture above shows a cross-section of the human eye. Notice the spot at the back of the retina called the fovea. It's a small dimple. In fact, it's a bit distorted in this picture, because it has been deliberately made larger than actual size because otherwise you wouldn't be able to see it.
It's only 0.2mm in diameter, and makes a visual arc of 1.5 degrees with the lens of the eye.
It's this dimension which dictates the size of test we can comfortably read.
Now look at this second picture:
This one shows the extraocular muscles which move our eyes from side-to-side and up-and-down. There are two other extraocular muscles which aren't show; they are used to roll or rotate the eyes.
When we read text, we might think that we're moving smoothly across the words, lines and pages. Nothing could be further from the truth...
It was a French oculist, Emil Javal, who found in 1906 that the eyes move in a series of rapid jerky movements.
Again, the size of the movements and their extent is determined by the size of the fovea, and controlled by the extraocular muscles.
Early research of this kind was pretty brutal. If you're squeamish about eyes (like my Microsoft colleague and friend Greg Hitchcock), skip the rest of this paragraph. Javal attached small clay cups to the surface of his subjects' eyes connected to threads to measure eye movements (some research projects used hooks instead!).
Greg: you can start reading again now :-)
The findings of Javal and others have been confirmed by modern eye-tracking equipment which is a lot less invasive.
The eyes scan "targets" of between 5 and 7 characters at a time. They scan five such targets (Javal called them fixations) per second. They take only 20-25 milliseconds to jump jerkily from one target to the next (Javal called the jumps saccades).
It seems pretty obvious that the comfort v. efficiency finding that readers prefer columns of 55-65 characters is determined by the amount of tension and stretching required in the extraocular muscles which control side-to-side eye movement. If the tension and stretching gets uncomfortable enough, the reader has to turn her head - using a much larger set of muscles in the neck...
The earliest picture we humans learn to recognize is that of another human face. Here's how the eyes behave when scanning it:
The black dots are the fixations, the lighter lines are the saccades.
In contrast, here's how we move our eyes when reading text:
Saccade lengths vary: we can skip over common words like "and" , "A", and "the".
Notice the "reverse saccade" on line 2, where we may have to skip backwards if we either didn't recognize or our brain didn't properly parse the meaning from the pattern it recognized.
This simple analysis of human physiology explains why optimum line-lengths and leading evolved over the centuries to help us read.
If the distance between lines is too great, we have problems and are less efficient at finding the next line: the eyes have to travel too far, while the brain is holding the short-term parsing from the previous line so it can link the meaning to the next one.
At the same time, if the lines are too close together, two things happen: The ascending and descending strokes from adjacent lines can collide, or get close enough to confuse our pattern-recognition - or we end up reading the same lines twice, which confuses our brain as it tries to derive meaning from the patterns.
If you're a proofreader, this phenomenon of reading lines twice has a name : it's called doubling.
Now think about what happens when we read text in a scrolling window. We always end up reading some lines twice just to find out where we are.
Over the centuries, printers and typographers found (by evolutionary "experiment" - which we can call type mutations) that the optimum amount of spacing between lines of normal length was about 120% of the type size they were using.
They didn't call it inter-linear spacing, of course. They called it leading, because it was created by placing thin pieces of lead between the lines of type.
When I started working in newspapers in Scotland in 1969, the newspaper I worked on was still set in hot metal. As a page editor, I had to be able to read type upside down and back-to-front in order to do the final copy-fitting on the "stone" - the heavy metal table (it used to be stone, hence the name) on which the frame holding all the type of the page was worked.
Now, we can't blame the geeks who invented Web browsing in the 1990s for getting this wrong. It's much easier to put text in a scrolling window than to paginate it - which of course you have to do if you aren't scrolling. And it took print designers hundreds of years to develop the high standard of text readability we take for granted when we open a book today.
We've only really been reading text on screens since mass-market graphical user interfaces appeared with the Apple Macintosh in 1984 (I was there, with a Mac six weeks after they first shipped).
The Internet has really only been mainstream since about 1995.
In other words, we're still in the early days of the Web. It's easy to forget that.
And there's lots that we can fix to make it better. In future postings, I'll be exploring some of these in detail.
It wasn't scientifically planned in the beginning. What worked, survived over the centuries, and what didn't work died. Darwinian evolution.
Although it wasn't scientifically planned, science can explain the evolution in terms of the human visual system.
A huge body of work on the readability of text was developed by two US university researchers in the years from 1929 until about the mid-1960s. They were Miles Tinker and his colleague Donald Paterson.
By as early as 1940, they'd carried out speed of reading and comprehension tests on more than 33,000 research subjects.
Although their findings were based on text in print, the same readability parameters apply equally to the screen - with a few adjustments.
Tinker and Paterson found reading only became comfortable when the text was at least 9 points high. (A point is the traditional printers' measure, = 1/72 inch).
Readability improved at 10 point, got better still at 11 point, dropped off very slightly at 12, and fell off sharply beyond 13 point.
They also found that readers read most comfortably when columns of text were between 55 and 65 characters wide at those sizes.
Interestingly enough, the team I was then running at Microsoft funded a university research project which initially puzzled us until I realized that we humans will trade efficiency for comfort.
Mary Dyson and her team at the University of Reading in the UK found that reading was actually more efficient with wider columns, (~100 characters), but that people still preferred the narrower measure.
This surprising finding - and those of Tinker and Paterson, can be explained once you look at the human eye.
The picture above shows a cross-section of the human eye. Notice the spot at the back of the retina called the fovea. It's a small dimple. In fact, it's a bit distorted in this picture, because it has been deliberately made larger than actual size because otherwise you wouldn't be able to see it.
It's only 0.2mm in diameter, and makes a visual arc of 1.5 degrees with the lens of the eye.
It's this dimension which dictates the size of test we can comfortably read.
Now look at this second picture:
This one shows the extraocular muscles which move our eyes from side-to-side and up-and-down. There are two other extraocular muscles which aren't show; they are used to roll or rotate the eyes.
When we read text, we might think that we're moving smoothly across the words, lines and pages. Nothing could be further from the truth...
It was a French oculist, Emil Javal, who found in 1906 that the eyes move in a series of rapid jerky movements.
Again, the size of the movements and their extent is determined by the size of the fovea, and controlled by the extraocular muscles.
Early research of this kind was pretty brutal. If you're squeamish about eyes (like my Microsoft colleague and friend Greg Hitchcock), skip the rest of this paragraph. Javal attached small clay cups to the surface of his subjects' eyes connected to threads to measure eye movements (some research projects used hooks instead!).
Greg: you can start reading again now :-)
The findings of Javal and others have been confirmed by modern eye-tracking equipment which is a lot less invasive.
The eyes scan "targets" of between 5 and 7 characters at a time. They scan five such targets (Javal called them fixations) per second. They take only 20-25 milliseconds to jump jerkily from one target to the next (Javal called the jumps saccades).
It seems pretty obvious that the comfort v. efficiency finding that readers prefer columns of 55-65 characters is determined by the amount of tension and stretching required in the extraocular muscles which control side-to-side eye movement. If the tension and stretching gets uncomfortable enough, the reader has to turn her head - using a much larger set of muscles in the neck...
The earliest picture we humans learn to recognize is that of another human face. Here's how the eyes behave when scanning it:
The black dots are the fixations, the lighter lines are the saccades.
In contrast, here's how we move our eyes when reading text:
Saccade lengths vary: we can skip over common words like "and" , "A", and "the".
Notice the "reverse saccade" on line 2, where we may have to skip backwards if we either didn't recognize or our brain didn't properly parse the meaning from the pattern it recognized.
This simple analysis of human physiology explains why optimum line-lengths and leading evolved over the centuries to help us read.
If the distance between lines is too great, we have problems and are less efficient at finding the next line: the eyes have to travel too far, while the brain is holding the short-term parsing from the previous line so it can link the meaning to the next one.
At the same time, if the lines are too close together, two things happen: The ascending and descending strokes from adjacent lines can collide, or get close enough to confuse our pattern-recognition - or we end up reading the same lines twice, which confuses our brain as it tries to derive meaning from the patterns.
If you're a proofreader, this phenomenon of reading lines twice has a name : it's called doubling.
Now think about what happens when we read text in a scrolling window. We always end up reading some lines twice just to find out where we are.
Over the centuries, printers and typographers found (by evolutionary "experiment" - which we can call type mutations) that the optimum amount of spacing between lines of normal length was about 120% of the type size they were using.
They didn't call it inter-linear spacing, of course. They called it leading, because it was created by placing thin pieces of lead between the lines of type.
When I started working in newspapers in Scotland in 1969, the newspaper I worked on was still set in hot metal. As a page editor, I had to be able to read type upside down and back-to-front in order to do the final copy-fitting on the "stone" - the heavy metal table (it used to be stone, hence the name) on which the frame holding all the type of the page was worked.
Now, we can't blame the geeks who invented Web browsing in the 1990s for getting this wrong. It's much easier to put text in a scrolling window than to paginate it - which of course you have to do if you aren't scrolling. And it took print designers hundreds of years to develop the high standard of text readability we take for granted when we open a book today.
We've only really been reading text on screens since mass-market graphical user interfaces appeared with the Apple Macintosh in 1984 (I was there, with a Mac six weeks after they first shipped).
The Internet has really only been mainstream since about 1995.
In other words, we're still in the early days of the Web. It's easy to forget that.
And there's lots that we can fix to make it better. In future postings, I'll be exploring some of these in detail.
550 years of getting it right
We've been improving readability in print for about 550 years since Johannes Gutenberg invented moveable metal type, an ink that would stick to it, and a press which enabled multiple impression of a page to be taken.
Gutenberg didn't invent printing. The Diamond Sutra was the first printed book, in the 10th Century. The Koreans had moveable clay type in 1024. People had been printing from woodblocks for centuries before that.
Gutenberg was the Henry Ford of his day. He mechanized the process, and the ability to use it to create multiple copies of books and other documents exploded first across Europe and then the rest of the world.
Gutenberg's technology broke the stranglehold on information previously held by the Roman Catholic Church.
Type and page designers have been working ever since on improving readability to the point where today - at least in print - text is at the pinnacle of more than five centuries of evolution.
It's much, much harder to set type well than to set it badly. Unless you've been involved, you have no idea of the complexity. Letter shapes and the way the work with each other, letter spacing. Word spacing. Alignment. Line length. Margins. Page size.
All these factors need to be computed to a precision of about 1/600th of an inch. Why? Because that's the resolution of human vision.
The apparatus we use to read is a high-precision scanning machine made up of our eyes, the muscles that move them, and our brains.
This machine operates at 600 dots per inch (dpi), takes 20-25 milliseconds to find each scanning target, and scans five targets per second.
Over 550 years, text has evolved to be optimized for this scanning machine, so it can operate in the most efficient way possible.
It wasn't particularly deliberate or scientific in the beginning. No-one knew how human vision worked. Instead, what happened was a process of Darwinian evolution.
In other words, people just tried stuff (mutations, if you like). What worked, survived, and what didn't work died along the way. There have been many experiments in type and type technology.
We've only been doing onscreen reading for about 23 years. My nomination for the start point was the appearance of a Graphical User Interface for mass-market computing with the launch of the Apple Macintosh in 1984.
It's easy to put type on a screen. It's much harder to do it well, properly optimized for human reading. In fact, I'd argue that we have not yet succeeded in creating a truly optimized reading experience on a screen.
As I said earlier, it's very much harder to set type well than to set it badly. The only reason so much care is taken in print is that badly-set text is not acceptable to human readers.
We haven't really begun to take the same care on the screen.
Oh, it can be done. All the technologies exist today to do it. But no-one's ever put them together properly. That's what I'm trying to at Microsoft, the only reason I joined the company and the reason I stay.
Reading's a core human task. People use it every day. None of our economic prosperity, science or technology would have happened without it. It spawned the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment - so even the political shape of our world today would not exist without the schools of thought which sprung up with the availability of books and education.
Reading's the first thing anyone has to learn if they want to learn anything, to improve their lot in life.
And it's undergoing the biggest change in 550 years, as more and more of it takes place as we look at a screen.
It might seem that reading onscreen's "OK" to you. But it isn't, to anyone who really knows about text and type. There's so much that's wrong that needs to be fixed.
We need to take the lessons we've learned in the past 550 years and apply them to text onscreen. In future blog postings, I'll talk about that, and what I think needs to be done.
550 years getting it right for print. It won't take us anything like that to create the best-possible reading experience on screen, one that's every bit as good as - in fact, better than - paper.
Gutenberg didn't invent printing. The Diamond Sutra was the first printed book, in the 10th Century. The Koreans had moveable clay type in 1024. People had been printing from woodblocks for centuries before that.
Gutenberg was the Henry Ford of his day. He mechanized the process, and the ability to use it to create multiple copies of books and other documents exploded first across Europe and then the rest of the world.
Gutenberg's technology broke the stranglehold on information previously held by the Roman Catholic Church.
Type and page designers have been working ever since on improving readability to the point where today - at least in print - text is at the pinnacle of more than five centuries of evolution.
It's much, much harder to set type well than to set it badly. Unless you've been involved, you have no idea of the complexity. Letter shapes and the way the work with each other, letter spacing. Word spacing. Alignment. Line length. Margins. Page size.
All these factors need to be computed to a precision of about 1/600th of an inch. Why? Because that's the resolution of human vision.
The apparatus we use to read is a high-precision scanning machine made up of our eyes, the muscles that move them, and our brains.
This machine operates at 600 dots per inch (dpi), takes 20-25 milliseconds to find each scanning target, and scans five targets per second.
Over 550 years, text has evolved to be optimized for this scanning machine, so it can operate in the most efficient way possible.
It wasn't particularly deliberate or scientific in the beginning. No-one knew how human vision worked. Instead, what happened was a process of Darwinian evolution.
In other words, people just tried stuff (mutations, if you like). What worked, survived, and what didn't work died along the way. There have been many experiments in type and type technology.
We've only been doing onscreen reading for about 23 years. My nomination for the start point was the appearance of a Graphical User Interface for mass-market computing with the launch of the Apple Macintosh in 1984.
It's easy to put type on a screen. It's much harder to do it well, properly optimized for human reading. In fact, I'd argue that we have not yet succeeded in creating a truly optimized reading experience on a screen.
As I said earlier, it's very much harder to set type well than to set it badly. The only reason so much care is taken in print is that badly-set text is not acceptable to human readers.
We haven't really begun to take the same care on the screen.
Oh, it can be done. All the technologies exist today to do it. But no-one's ever put them together properly. That's what I'm trying to at Microsoft, the only reason I joined the company and the reason I stay.
Reading's a core human task. People use it every day. None of our economic prosperity, science or technology would have happened without it. It spawned the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment - so even the political shape of our world today would not exist without the schools of thought which sprung up with the availability of books and education.
Reading's the first thing anyone has to learn if they want to learn anything, to improve their lot in life.
And it's undergoing the biggest change in 550 years, as more and more of it takes place as we look at a screen.
It might seem that reading onscreen's "OK" to you. But it isn't, to anyone who really knows about text and type. There's so much that's wrong that needs to be fixed.
We need to take the lessons we've learned in the past 550 years and apply them to text onscreen. In future blog postings, I'll talk about that, and what I think needs to be done.
550 years getting it right for print. It won't take us anything like that to create the best-possible reading experience on screen, one that's every bit as good as - in fact, better than - paper.
The Future of Reading
In case anyone's in any doubt about my position, it's this: The future of reading will be on the screen. Using the Web, of course, but with both online and offline reading experiences.
Now, at this point, I'm sure you're asking, "Well, we read on the Web today. So what's the problem? Aren't we done?"
Well no, we're far from done. I'm going to talk in this blog about why reading's so important and what still needs to be done (a lot!). I'm going to share my vision of the future, and I'm going to share a lot of history - some of it my own, most of it the history of mankind, reading and communication.
Reading is one of the most critical skills we have to develop as humans if we ever want to rise above a basic existence.
I guess in some ways, I'm a poster child for how reading can change your life. So I'm going to share some personal history to illustrate how that happens.
I was born and brought up in the East End of Glasgow in Scotland - most of it in pretty brutal housing projects. It doesn't get much tougher, anywhere. Unemployment at least 30%. Substance abuse. Domestic (and plenty of other) violence. Kids who left school at 16 and ended up in dead-end jobs with no prospect. About the best many could hope for was that their jobs wouldn't disappear as the industries which supported them folded. (like shipbuilding, once the major industry on the River Clyde which runs through Glasgow, and now just a memory - with two yards left out of dozens).
I took a completely different route. And it all started when I learned to read. I was about three years old at the time. We were living in a house in Allison Street, Glasgow which had formerly been a shop. It still had the glass front, which had been painted over to give us privacy and create the one bedroom in which my father, mother, my sister and I slept...
My mother and father would go out occasionally, and Tommy, the 16-year-old son of a neighbor, would come and babysit me.
One day, he produced an old school exercise book. It was filled with drawing and writings. He'd produced his own comic-book, and he read it to me.
Before long, I was reading, too. My parents noticed. The most lasting memory I have of my father was of him holding out his hands to me and saying, "Son, I only ever learned to work with these. You've got to learn to work with your head."
My Dad had had a pretty tough life. Born in Glasgow in 1919, he left school in 1933, right in the heart of the Depression - and it didn't get much more depressed than Glasgow...
Unable to find a job, he joined the British Royal Navy as a boy sailor. He spent 17 years in the Navy. He served on the battleship Hood (named after a famous British admiral). He was lucky enough to be posted out of the Hood a few months before it was torpedoed and sunk with the loss of well over 1200 men. I think only six survived.
For my dad, though, it was a case of narrowly missing the frying pan and jumping straight into the fire. He served right through World War II as deck crew on a destroyer in the Atlantic convoys. He took part in a number of the brutal convoys supplying fuel, arms and food to the Russian port of Murmansk. During the whole war, ships on which he served were torpedoed three times.
To the end of his life he always laced up his working-boots in a certain way. I asked him why, and he explained that with one stroke of a knife you could cut all the laces, kick off your boots and start swimming if you ended up in the water. A survival trick which became an unconscious habit...
His job on deck was to fire the Hedgehog - a multiple depth-charge thrower used to attack submerged German U-Boats.
It didn't get much tougher than the Murmansk convoys. Since Norway was then occupied by the Nazis, any convoy was subjected to continuous air attacks, sinking attempts by U-Boat "wolfpacks", the ever-present threat that the German capital fleet (including the battleship Tirpitz) would leave its anchorages in the Norwegian fiords.
It was also a constant battle against rain, snow, ice, gales, and heavy seas so cold that you couldn't survive in them for more than two minutes.
If you want to know what it was like you can't do much better than read the novel "HMS Ulysses" by the writer Alistair MacLean.
When he left the Navy at the end of the Korean War, the only job he could get was as a high-steel construction worker.
Anyway, both he and my mother knew the value an education could have brought in their lives, and were determined to give their own children every chance.
When I was four, they bought me a set of The Children's Encyclopedia, written and compiled by Arthur Mee. I can still picture it, red bindings with gold-tooled lettering. God knows what it cost them as a percentage of their annual income.
But for me it was a godsend. I used to spend at least a couple of hours a day with my head buried in those books. I took incredible care not to get a single mark on a page.
By the time I was ten years old, we were living in a housing project called Barlanark, in the East End (closer to my father's family).
I attended a four-classroom school in a prefabricated building with zinc-galvanized steel walls, called Pendeen Road Primary School.
I watched as kids left there to go to the local junior high school, and leave to get jobs at 15 and 16 years old.
But by then I was reading huge numbers of books a week which I borrowed from the local Glasgow Public Library (commandeering the library tickets from the whole family) and I knew there was more to life than the default option.
I went to the head teacher and asked for more homework so I could work towards a scholarship to the only good school I knew of, Allan Glen's High School of Science in the center of Glasgow.
Cut a long story short, I succeeded, and that changed my life.
In November 1998, I found myself waiting to go onstage at the Las Vegas Convention Center. I was in the Green Room with Bill Gates, who'd asked me to come on stage during his major keynote speech of the year to announce and show ClearType, which I'd helped to invent, along with Bert Keely, Greg Hitchcock and Mike Duggan.
Bill went out to start his speech, and I was left alone in the room. Just before I walked out on the stage, the thought ran through my head :" It's a helluva long way from Old Shettleston Road to here!".
And it was reading which had brought me all the way. Without it, none of it would have happened.
That's enough for a first posting. In the next post, I'll talk about how I became a professional writer, then how I got involved in personal computing as it changed the publishing industry for ever.
I apologize for all the personal history so far, but, each stage taught me something about how reading needs to change for the 21st Century.
Now, at this point, I'm sure you're asking, "Well, we read on the Web today. So what's the problem? Aren't we done?"
Well no, we're far from done. I'm going to talk in this blog about why reading's so important and what still needs to be done (a lot!). I'm going to share my vision of the future, and I'm going to share a lot of history - some of it my own, most of it the history of mankind, reading and communication.
Reading is one of the most critical skills we have to develop as humans if we ever want to rise above a basic existence.
I guess in some ways, I'm a poster child for how reading can change your life. So I'm going to share some personal history to illustrate how that happens.
I was born and brought up in the East End of Glasgow in Scotland - most of it in pretty brutal housing projects. It doesn't get much tougher, anywhere. Unemployment at least 30%. Substance abuse. Domestic (and plenty of other) violence. Kids who left school at 16 and ended up in dead-end jobs with no prospect. About the best many could hope for was that their jobs wouldn't disappear as the industries which supported them folded. (like shipbuilding, once the major industry on the River Clyde which runs through Glasgow, and now just a memory - with two yards left out of dozens).
I took a completely different route. And it all started when I learned to read. I was about three years old at the time. We were living in a house in Allison Street, Glasgow which had formerly been a shop. It still had the glass front, which had been painted over to give us privacy and create the one bedroom in which my father, mother, my sister and I slept...
My mother and father would go out occasionally, and Tommy, the 16-year-old son of a neighbor, would come and babysit me.
One day, he produced an old school exercise book. It was filled with drawing and writings. He'd produced his own comic-book, and he read it to me.
Before long, I was reading, too. My parents noticed. The most lasting memory I have of my father was of him holding out his hands to me and saying, "Son, I only ever learned to work with these. You've got to learn to work with your head."
My Dad had had a pretty tough life. Born in Glasgow in 1919, he left school in 1933, right in the heart of the Depression - and it didn't get much more depressed than Glasgow...
Unable to find a job, he joined the British Royal Navy as a boy sailor. He spent 17 years in the Navy. He served on the battleship Hood (named after a famous British admiral). He was lucky enough to be posted out of the Hood a few months before it was torpedoed and sunk with the loss of well over 1200 men. I think only six survived.
For my dad, though, it was a case of narrowly missing the frying pan and jumping straight into the fire. He served right through World War II as deck crew on a destroyer in the Atlantic convoys. He took part in a number of the brutal convoys supplying fuel, arms and food to the Russian port of Murmansk. During the whole war, ships on which he served were torpedoed three times.
To the end of his life he always laced up his working-boots in a certain way. I asked him why, and he explained that with one stroke of a knife you could cut all the laces, kick off your boots and start swimming if you ended up in the water. A survival trick which became an unconscious habit...
His job on deck was to fire the Hedgehog - a multiple depth-charge thrower used to attack submerged German U-Boats.
It didn't get much tougher than the Murmansk convoys. Since Norway was then occupied by the Nazis, any convoy was subjected to continuous air attacks, sinking attempts by U-Boat "wolfpacks", the ever-present threat that the German capital fleet (including the battleship Tirpitz) would leave its anchorages in the Norwegian fiords.
It was also a constant battle against rain, snow, ice, gales, and heavy seas so cold that you couldn't survive in them for more than two minutes.
If you want to know what it was like you can't do much better than read the novel "HMS Ulysses" by the writer Alistair MacLean.
When he left the Navy at the end of the Korean War, the only job he could get was as a high-steel construction worker.
Anyway, both he and my mother knew the value an education could have brought in their lives, and were determined to give their own children every chance.
When I was four, they bought me a set of The Children's Encyclopedia, written and compiled by Arthur Mee. I can still picture it, red bindings with gold-tooled lettering. God knows what it cost them as a percentage of their annual income.
But for me it was a godsend. I used to spend at least a couple of hours a day with my head buried in those books. I took incredible care not to get a single mark on a page.
By the time I was ten years old, we were living in a housing project called Barlanark, in the East End (closer to my father's family).
I attended a four-classroom school in a prefabricated building with zinc-galvanized steel walls, called Pendeen Road Primary School.
I watched as kids left there to go to the local junior high school, and leave to get jobs at 15 and 16 years old.
But by then I was reading huge numbers of books a week which I borrowed from the local Glasgow Public Library (commandeering the library tickets from the whole family) and I knew there was more to life than the default option.
I went to the head teacher and asked for more homework so I could work towards a scholarship to the only good school I knew of, Allan Glen's High School of Science in the center of Glasgow.
Cut a long story short, I succeeded, and that changed my life.
In November 1998, I found myself waiting to go onstage at the Las Vegas Convention Center. I was in the Green Room with Bill Gates, who'd asked me to come on stage during his major keynote speech of the year to announce and show ClearType, which I'd helped to invent, along with Bert Keely, Greg Hitchcock and Mike Duggan.
Bill went out to start his speech, and I was left alone in the room. Just before I walked out on the stage, the thought ran through my head :" It's a helluva long way from Old Shettleston Road to here!".
And it was reading which had brought me all the way. Without it, none of it would have happened.
That's enough for a first posting. In the next post, I'll talk about how I became a professional writer, then how I got involved in personal computing as it changed the publishing industry for ever.
I apologize for all the personal history so far, but, each stage taught me something about how reading needs to change for the 21st Century.
Homo Sapiens Version 1.0
We think we're so civilized in the 21st Century. We have cars, boats, planes, computers, and a host of other technology.
But we aren't. Scratch the surface of any human on the face of the planet, and you'll find we're all the same. We're Homo sapiens Version 1.0, the "human race" as we call it. This "sapiens" version "shipped" about 140,000 years ago - and there's no sign of an upgrade yet.
Homo sapiens V.1 - let's just say humans from now on - is a hunter-gatherer, a member of a species which survived by gathering fruits, nuts, plants and vegetables, and by hunting other animal species (and in the past our own species, too).
Our perception system developed to do that. The human visual and aural systems developed to allow us to gather and hunt, and also to survive if anyone - of our own or other species - was hunting us.
140,000 years is a very short time in evolutionary terms. The latest research I heard about just yesterday, involving analysis of chimpanzee and human DNA, suggests it took some 4-5 million years for the "proto-chimp" and "proto-human" races to split apart into two distinct branches.
It's well known that chimpanzees are our closest genetic relatives; we share about 98% of the same DNA. Putting that another way, only 2% of our DNA separates us from the chimps.
DNA mapping has revealed some fascinating history of the human race. The book, The Journey of Man - A Genetic Odyssey - confirms that every human on the planet shares the same piece of DNA with a woman who lived in Africa only 140,000 years ago - and with a man who left Africa only 60,000 years ago.
We make a lot of the differences between the "races". But we're all the same, really. We're all Africans, descendents of those few early humans who left Africa around that time. Some families (which later became tribes, races or nations) settled on coastlines where they could survive on fish, seafoods, and coastal plants. Some ventured farther in to continents; some of those settlers branched into separate bands of explorers. The branchings can all be traced through DNA mapping.
The American continent was the last to be settled. It had to wait for the invention of technologies which allowed us to navigate through the cold lands created by successive Ice Ages.
Jared Diamond's terrific book, "Guns, Germs and Steel" talks about this diaspora in fascinating detail.
Because 140,000 years of human evolution is so short, we all still retain the same hunter-gatherer perception system.
We carry a "bubble of perception" with us as we move through the world. Our forward-facing eyes have about 207 degrees of peripheral vision. Our two ears give us binaural hearing which allows us to perceive the direction from which sounds are coming. They tell us when to turn our heads, so we get 360-degree peripheral vision when we need it - important when a lion, for example, is stalking us from behind.
This part of our perception system is unconscious and automatic; it runs all the time when we're awake and our eyes are open. It has to - if you weren't in survival mode all the time, you wouldn't survive.
We are incredibly sensitive to two occurences. First, movement anywhere in our field of vision (or sound from behind us) is the highest priority signal. Why? Well, to a hunter-gatherer, movement represents either threat, or lunch.
We are also highly skilled at recognizing patterns, especially visual. After all, if you can't tell the difference between the visual pattern of a plant that's good to eat and one that's poisonous, you won't last long.
We learned to recognize the patterns. In hunter-gatherer times, we learned them from our families, especially our elders.
Stated in computer terms, human visual pattern recognition is like a device driver. The program is something like:
On birth
Start recognizing patterns
On death,
End recognizing patterns
If you believe in re-incarnation, add another line:
Loop until perfect
And there you have the whole program.
You think this is ancient history? No, you use this every second of every day, even today.
I'm sure we've all had the same experience. You drive somewhere pretty familiar, say on a freeway.
You get where you're going, switch off the engine and then think, "Hmm... I drove about 40 miles on the freeway. I obeyed all the road signs. I avoided all the other cars on the road. Obviously I didn't have an accident. And I can't remember half the trip because I was thinking about something else".
Continuous, unconscious, visual pattern recognition is like a safety-net that protects us all the time, even if we're not aware of it.
Why it's so easy to enter this state on a long drive is something I'll talk about later.
There's another part of our visual system that's also very important. There's a special area in our field of vision which is high-resolution, and works just like a scanner.
That's the subject of the next blog entry,
But we aren't. Scratch the surface of any human on the face of the planet, and you'll find we're all the same. We're Homo sapiens Version 1.0, the "human race" as we call it. This "sapiens" version "shipped" about 140,000 years ago - and there's no sign of an upgrade yet.
Homo sapiens V.1 - let's just say humans from now on - is a hunter-gatherer, a member of a species which survived by gathering fruits, nuts, plants and vegetables, and by hunting other animal species (and in the past our own species, too).
Our perception system developed to do that. The human visual and aural systems developed to allow us to gather and hunt, and also to survive if anyone - of our own or other species - was hunting us.
140,000 years is a very short time in evolutionary terms. The latest research I heard about just yesterday, involving analysis of chimpanzee and human DNA, suggests it took some 4-5 million years for the "proto-chimp" and "proto-human" races to split apart into two distinct branches.
It's well known that chimpanzees are our closest genetic relatives; we share about 98% of the same DNA. Putting that another way, only 2% of our DNA separates us from the chimps.
DNA mapping has revealed some fascinating history of the human race. The book, The Journey of Man - A Genetic Odyssey - confirms that every human on the planet shares the same piece of DNA with a woman who lived in Africa only 140,000 years ago - and with a man who left Africa only 60,000 years ago.
We make a lot of the differences between the "races". But we're all the same, really. We're all Africans, descendents of those few early humans who left Africa around that time. Some families (which later became tribes, races or nations) settled on coastlines where they could survive on fish, seafoods, and coastal plants. Some ventured farther in to continents; some of those settlers branched into separate bands of explorers. The branchings can all be traced through DNA mapping.
The American continent was the last to be settled. It had to wait for the invention of technologies which allowed us to navigate through the cold lands created by successive Ice Ages.
Jared Diamond's terrific book, "Guns, Germs and Steel" talks about this diaspora in fascinating detail.
Because 140,000 years of human evolution is so short, we all still retain the same hunter-gatherer perception system.
We carry a "bubble of perception" with us as we move through the world. Our forward-facing eyes have about 207 degrees of peripheral vision. Our two ears give us binaural hearing which allows us to perceive the direction from which sounds are coming. They tell us when to turn our heads, so we get 360-degree peripheral vision when we need it - important when a lion, for example, is stalking us from behind.
This part of our perception system is unconscious and automatic; it runs all the time when we're awake and our eyes are open. It has to - if you weren't in survival mode all the time, you wouldn't survive.
We are incredibly sensitive to two occurences. First, movement anywhere in our field of vision (or sound from behind us) is the highest priority signal. Why? Well, to a hunter-gatherer, movement represents either threat, or lunch.
We are also highly skilled at recognizing patterns, especially visual. After all, if you can't tell the difference between the visual pattern of a plant that's good to eat and one that's poisonous, you won't last long.
We learned to recognize the patterns. In hunter-gatherer times, we learned them from our families, especially our elders.
Stated in computer terms, human visual pattern recognition is like a device driver. The program is something like:
On birth
Start recognizing patterns
On death,
End recognizing patterns
If you believe in re-incarnation, add another line:
Loop until perfect
And there you have the whole program.
You think this is ancient history? No, you use this every second of every day, even today.
I'm sure we've all had the same experience. You drive somewhere pretty familiar, say on a freeway.
You get where you're going, switch off the engine and then think, "Hmm... I drove about 40 miles on the freeway. I obeyed all the road signs. I avoided all the other cars on the road. Obviously I didn't have an accident. And I can't remember half the trip because I was thinking about something else".
Continuous, unconscious, visual pattern recognition is like a safety-net that protects us all the time, even if we're not aware of it.
Why it's so easy to enter this state on a long drive is something I'll talk about later.
There's another part of our visual system that's also very important. There's a special area in our field of vision which is high-resolution, and works just like a scanner.
That's the subject of the next blog entry,
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