2 - Introduction

This ongoing study into the readability of text on screen was carried out as part of Microsoft’s “Bookmaker” Electronic Books project.

If electronic books are ever to become an acceptable alternative to books in print, readability is the biggest single challenge they must overcome. We can deliver text on screen, and the computer offers significant potential advantages in terms of searching, adding active time-based media such as sound, carrying many different books in a single device, and so on.

But will electronic books be readable? Will people ever want to spend the same amount of time looking at a screen as they spend today reading a printed book?

People still don’t like to read even relatively short documents on screen, whereas they will happily spend many hours “lost” in a book. Unless we can make significant advances in readability, electronic books will be limited to niche markets in which early adopters are prepared to put up with relatively poor readability. Is it merely a question of waiting until screens get better?

Almost 15 years ago, I helped develop a hypertext product aimed at moving us towards the “Paperless Office”. As we know, the Paperless Office has so far been a complete bust; more paper is produced today as a result of the widespread adoption of the desktop computer than at any time in history.

The Paperless Office foundered on the same shoal as the first attempts to produce electronic books – poor screen readability, because reading is the core of everything we do. This paper, I hope, explains what went wrong, and how to fix it. The Paperless Office is now a real possibility. We can make it a reality.

2.1 - First step: understand what works

To understand what went wrong, and how to fix it, the best place to start is by asking the question: “What went right?”

There is one undisputable fact: The Book works.

Boiled down to its essence, a book is basically sooty marks on shredded trees. Yet it succeeds in capturing and holding our attention for hours at a stretch. Not only that, but as we read it, the book itself disappears. The “real” book we read is inside our heads; reading is an immersive experience.

What’s going on here? What’s the magic?

Those questions are the starting-point of this study.

Although a great deal of readability and reading research has been done over the past couple of centuries, reading and how it works still remains something of a mystery.

One body of work has focused largely on typography and legibility. Another body of work has examined the psychology and physiology of reading. All the research so far has added valuable data to the body of knowledge. But it has failed to explain the true nature of reading and readability, possibly because it was the work of specialists, each with a strong focus in a single area such as psychology, physiology or typography.

I’m not a specialist, although I’ve been dealing with type for 30 years. This paper takes a generalist approach I believe is the key to understanding the phenomenon of immersive reading.

Some great work has been done on the specifics. But what has been lacking until now has been a way of tying all of this work together. Some important missing pieces were also missing from the puzzle. Writing, printing, binding books, and the human beings that read them together make up a “system”. Analyzing its parts does not reveal the whole picture.

2.2 - A General Theory of Readability

This paper puts forward a “General Theory of Readability”, which builds on the findings of these different areas of research, and adds perspectives from the study of information processing and instinctive human behavior, to build a new unified model of the reading process. I believe this model gives new insight into the magic of the book; how it works, and why it works. And thus it tells us how to recreate that magic on the screen.

Something deep and mysterious happens when we read, intimately linked to human psychology and physiology, and probably even to our DNA.

The book as we know it today did not happen by chance. It evolved over thousands (arguably millions) of years, as a result of human physiology and the way in which we perceive the world. In a very real sense, the form of the book as we know it today was predetermined by the decision of developing humans to specialize in visual pattern recognition as a core survival skill.

The book is a complex and sophisticated technology for holding and capturing human attention. It is hard to convince people of its sophistication; there are no flashing lights, no knobs or levers, no lines of programming code (there really is programming going on, but not in any sense we’d recognize today…)

The conclusions in this document could have great implications for the future of books. But books are only an extreme case of reading – a skill we use constantly in our daily lives. Advances made to enhance the readability of books on the screen also apply to the display of all information on computer screens, inside Microsoft applications and on the Web.

This has been an amazing journey of exploration for me. The central question: “What’s going on here?” kept leading backwards in time, from printed books to written manuscripts, to writing systems, to pictures drawn on the walls of caves by prehistoric man, and eventually to primitive survival skills and behaviors we humans share with all other animal forms. At the outset, I had no idea just how far back I’d have to go.

2.3 - What’s this got to do with software?

Some of the areas touched on in this report are pretty strange territory for a company at the leading edge of technology at the end of the 20th Century. But computer software isn’t an end in itself. We build it so people can create, gather, analyze and communicate information and ideas. Reading and writing are at the very heart of what we do. The difficulty that most people have in getting to grips with computers is a direct result of the fact that they force us to work in ways that are fundamentally different from the way we naturally perceive and interact with our world.

I came across the quote from Stanley Morison – one of the greatest and best-known names in the world of typography – only at the end of this current phase of work. Morison was talking about the design of new typefaces, but it is great advice for any researcher, in any field.

He is absolutely correct. Trying to get right back to the roots and basic principles involved in reading allows us to analyze the book and see it as a truly sophisticated technological system. And understanding how this technology hooks into human nature and perception makes it as relevant and alive today as when Johannes Gutenberg printed the first 42-line bible in Mainz more than five centuries ago, or when the first cave-dwellers drew the “user manual” for hunting on the walls of their homes.

Understanding the root-principle is key to taking text into the future. The computer can go beyond the book – but only if we first really understand it, then move forward with respect and without breaking what already works so well.

The basic principles outlined in this paper will allow us to focus future research on areas most likely to be productive, to develop specific applications for reading information on the screen, to develop testing methods and metrics so we can track how well we are doing, and to go “beyond the book”.

2.4 - Why is this a printed document?

Ideally, this document should have “walked the talk”, and been in electronic format for reading on the screen, demonstrating the validity of its conclusions.

Unfortunately, no system today exists that can deliver truly readable text on the screen. We have a first, far-from-perfect implementation, which is constrained by the device on which it runs. It is already better than anything seen so far, and will improve dramatically over the next few months.

This paper, I hope, explains how to build the first really useable eBook, and defines its functionality. But there’s a lot more work to be done to make it real.