http://www.textflows.com/ObamaInaugurationFlow

It runs longer than the speech itself (by half!), but you see the whole thing (the text) newly.

@karen: I agree with you about eReader. It does everything I want and more. Is there any other feature that would be desirable?

I’ve always been timid about dogearing and marginalia and stuff, but now I’m a total slut about it. Plus I use it to do stuff like this:
http://kt.posterous.com/favorite-passages-from-the-boo

So it’s eReader for me at least until Stanza can provide those sorts of functionality.

I appreciate and agree with all your comments. As one who began e-reading three years ago after a 20+-year hiatus from p-reading, I am reading like crazy to make up for lost time. My Touch is with me every minute of every day and most of my reading is done during spare moments although I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and grab the Touch off my night table to read without disturbing my spouse (if he’s not awake reading on his Touch!).

@chris: Here are some features I’d like to see in an ereader on a device:
1. +/- for fonts – i agree chris that the sliders are TERRIBLE at getting the font right on stanza
2. a way to stick a bookmark/dogear at a given spot in a text … ideally also allowing me to jot some notes/annotations. even more ideally, this gloss should be easily exportable.
3. a way to highlight certain text for later, i guess in congress with the above
4. stanza gives you a great indication of where you are in the chap (p 14/32) … but I would like same for the entire book.

@diane: glad to see authors really experimenting with this tech, and Birthday Girl looks great. But if all goes well, the tech makers will do a better job of it soon, and authors can (mostly, I hope) stick to writing. Oh, and making a living too … ;-)

I say eReaders and digital books — now that they’re becoming available on devices people already own — will breathe new life into publishing.

ePub, Kindle, & PDF versions of BIRTHDAY GIRL are here: http://tinyurl.com/getbirthdaygirl

BTW – I have tinkered with Stanza’s defaults a lot to get what I want, and get quite frustrated with the sensitivity of the sliders. This is what I have ended up with:

http://gallery.me.com/christopherhughes#100026&view=grid&bgcolor=black&sel=0

Also – a key benefit of Stanza over trade paperbacks: cheap books snap shut when you let go of them. I have some where you have to jam your thumb into the spine to keep it open enough to read it. Stanza allows you to read with one hand! Leaving the other free to pour wine into your parched throat.

One thing I would like – a graphical equivalent of the bookmark poking out of the top of the book, telling you how far you have to go.

The fact is, a bigger “page” will slow down reading. It’s well documented that reading long lines of text is more difficult (for one thing, it’s harder to relocate yourself at the beginning of the next line). The optimum line length is about 10-12 words. This is one of the first things design students are taught: a responsible designer keeps readability always in mind. So if screens get bigger than about 7 or 9 inches, a well-designed text for that screen will have wider margins to compensate. The extra screen space becomes a big waste, at a point.

I also find, as you have Hugh (and so many others report the same things we’ve noted before), that the smaller bite of text at a time, overall, keeps me more focused on it. As does the act of turning the page more often than with a print book.

But with all of that said, I think the optimum size probably is about 7″ — both to accomplish just the right line length and to make it easier to hold onto when lying in bed with it propped up. My wrist does sometimes get a little annoyed holding onto the little bugger, truth be told.

I wish that the mobile NYT for ipod/iphone would deliver their text into stanza or something like it – that would be great.