How we read yesterday, today, tomorow

The following lines are in fact a reply to a forum post that tried to convince me that we can read the same on a device as our ancestor have done than on stones:

"Does there have to be a better way to read, besides scrolling and turning pages?"
If you consider reading just a repetitive action of understanding letters the current way of doing thing is OK.
If you consider reading as a method of acquiring information then the old fashion way has a lot of drawbacks.

Aren't you bored by the fact that after 7k years of evolution and 50 years of computer technology around we still read the same?

We have to change. Why do you use the airplane today when the horse was so good yesterday? Because is better.
Be sure that in 10 minutes we can find together better ways of doing things.

Think for a moment at the times when you open a book in order to learn something. At that moment you don't just read the characters. You have to link the ideas the you acquire with information coming from other sources. Compare things, check notes or supplementary materials, theorems, videos, etc. It's simply impossible to put everything in the space of a page and still keep it simple to navigate. And I'm not speaking here about small screens ... it's hard to do a good placement on a full page. I've done this for more than 20 years for newspapers, magazines and all kind of books. Believe me it's a hell to have good information architecture on a simple polygon of a given size and with a fixed amount of letters.

I am definitely not thinking at eye ball tracking. It is just about information architecture and marrying that with the capabilities of the support that now is dynamic not just a simple stone or sheet of paper.

My grandfather had to consider limiting the number of pages for economic reasons. On a display you don't have any limitation on size. And I'm speaking about any size (font, row, number of colors, etc).

Wouldn't be better if, for example, we will rethink the book so that we read not one page at a time but one phrase having around all the information related to it. It will be easier to have just a phrase on screen and all related info at hand than a page filed with side boxes, end notes, footnotes, headings, etc. I'm not saying that this is the way to go ... it is just an example of rethinking the book.

Now let's look at another aspect.
We all know how much the readability depends on the length of the row and the number of characters per row. The number of words on a row will influence also how easy it is to understand the idea.
What if we will adapt the layout to the current phrase.

Some ideas are hard to layout in a page and still transmit the importance of the fragment. We tend to extract them and place a duplicate as a side box or something similar. What if we will think the book as something dynamic not by placing a video betwen lines but having those lines adapt to their importance. Good design implies using a small number of font variations but if change helps in the process of communicating the idea be sure that every designer will understand.

It is not change for the sake of change. And we are not speaking about technology but about reading and information.
The name of the game is improvement and we have to improve the way we read (or the way we prepare information for reading).