Why are novels laid out the way they are? It's almost as though its not as simple as "bad for reading" but rather a feature of the content.
imo it highly depends on the medium. If your content is packed with distracting ads, flashing banners, other unrelated text from other stories, then its helpful to make the columns narrow to help you scan.
If you have a more focused experience around one passage of text, wider text lets you fit more on the page and make better use of paragraph breaks and subheadings
Video games are routinely stomping over all known rules of good user interface in the name of art. And that's okay because it's a leisure activity, and efficiency and comfort is not the goal. I suspect the same thing is true of novels - making the text physically easier to read wouldn't make the story emotionally easier to enjoy, so they intentionally choose a suboptimal text layout for aesthetic reasons.
The only two types of books I can think of that are routinely read for purposes other than leisure - dictionaries and the Bible - are usually printed in multi-column layout from what I've seen.
Cost has always been a major factor in publishing fiction. 25% fewer words per line may boost comprehension by $x% but definitely increases cost by 25%. When markets are as price sensitive as leisure, cost is a big factor in the decision. Books don’t sell on a price per printed page basis. Mainstream publishers with existing distribution contracts are especially sensitive because of print runs.
When we published a print magazine we optimized heavily to save 1% on printing costs. 25% would have been suicide. And indie magazine buyers are traditionally a lot more price flexible than mainstream book buyers.
Old newspapers have overly narrow columns that make both full justification and hyphenation ugly. I don’t think we should be looking at 100-year old newspapers for inspiration. Maybe look at them and see how far we’ve come and how much improvement we have in modern printed matter.
Instead we should look at modern books. Without paying good money to use tools like InDesign, just use LaTeX with microtype together with the default margins. You will get the ideal width for text lines (about 60 to 80 characters), full justification with minimal hyphenation.
The problem with your argument is that if you look at 100 year old books and modern newspapers, you arrive at exactly the opposite conclusion - it seems we ditched full width text a long time ago and fully switched to narrow columns, and it must've been for a reason!
Dictionaries in columns statistically reduce white space and thus reduce the page count.
Especially for the definitions that are very short, for example when they only reference a more preferred spelling or a more prominent word that has the exact meaning.
So multicolumn layout increases whitespace in newspapers but decreases it in dictionaries? Funny how it always does the exact thing needed to disprove whatever I say in this exact moment.
Well ok ... If a full width newspaper needs the whole sheet and you put columns to reduce the necessary whitespace, you would end with blank space that you can fill with more articles or ads.
You don't really want to reduce the number of sheets for your newspaper because size of the newspaper is an indicator of quality. But trimming off maybe 10% of a dictionary is worthwhile. Size of a dictionary is a quality indicator too, but the absolute production cost is more for a book so saving production costs is more pressing.
That's easy. The columns have to be narrow enough that you can still read a full column of scripture while your éclair rests on the other half of the page. That's why a full-spread layout is referred to a "qautréclair."
For the past couple of years I have been the lead designer of C#. Anders and I took a break to help create TypeScript, and then he stayed on as it's lead designer, while I returned to take over C#.
Anders and I meet every week to compare notes, and I make sure to get his input on major new features in C#.
Lots of commenters seem to think that programmers are safe for a while. As a programmer, I sincerely hope they are right.
But, the majority of developers I know, including myself, are ultimately writing software to be used by humans, typically presenting data that is comprehensible to humans, so that they can make decisions.
If AI advances to the point where similar decisions can be made by machines, looking at the same data, then I fear that entire classes of applications will disappear, and with them, the need for developers who build them.
Obviously, we'll still need developers, though perhaps far fewer than are needed today. Perhaps software development will go through the same revolution that agriculture did, where from we went from > 90% to < 3% of the population being involved.
This is already nascent, but growing quickly, in a field typically called things like "robotic process automation" or "cognitive computing". Essentially, eliminating the need for wide swaths of CRUD and business process enterprise applications, and the developers who create them (and the sysadmins who support them, etc etc).
Part one is linked, though not clearly, from the article.[0]
Checking the category under which this was posted, Rants, gets you to number two in a single page where a good old Mark I eyeball grep is enough to get you there with some brief scrolling.[1]
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