This is a test to see if typographer's quotes work in Live Writer.

"The apostrophe looks like the Feet mark," he said, " although commas are directional".

Obviously they don't work - I'll have to cut and paste from Microsoft Word, which does understand the concept and is actually quite clever about it.

“Does that work”, he asked.

Well yes it does, provided you are prepared to go in and re-specify the correct font. And no automatic smileys either.

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. I like the way Live Spaces lets me create a multiple-column layout. But it only works for the top section of the content. If you've read this far, 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 :-)

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...

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'll write more in detail about that experience later. 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.

bill

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.