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By Chris Meadows

in-defense-of-readers When I was browsing InstaPaper’s “Give me something to read” site, I came across this article. Although it is mostly about usability in web design, it touches on e-books and other reading issues in its discussion of how and why web designers should optimize their sites to make readers more comfortable.

I couldn’t help but see myself in the passages where the article talked about how readers shut out the world. I expect many other avid readers will, as well.

Once a reader has commanded the aura of solitude around them, they become nearly impenetrable. A reader who is thoroughly engrossed in reading may not hear you if you call her name. Call her name again, however, and she will look up, annoyed. The key is not to halt all activity around a reader, but to give her her space.

Of course, there are some readers who won’t even notice that. Yomiko Readman, for example.

The article has some excellent advice for web designers who want to make their sites easier to read—and some of it would even apply to e-book designers. I wonder what the author would think if she knew that I read it on my iPod Touch using InstaPaper, an interface that is itself designed to maximize small-screen readability of articles from the web?

 
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