by Bill Gates
Reprinted from The World in 2000, a publication of The Economist Group
Reading on paper is so much a part of our lives that it is hard to imagine anything could ever replace inky marks on shredded trees. Since Johannes Gutenberg invented an economical way to make movable metal type in the 15th century, making it possible to produce reading matter quickly, comparatively cheaply and in large quantities, the printed word has proved amazingly resilient. So how could anyone believe that sales of electronic books will equal those of paper books within a decade or so?
First, it is worth remembering that paper is only the latest in a long line of reading technologies that were made obsolete each time an improved solution emerged. Pictures drawn on rock gave way to clay tablets with cuneiform characters pressed into the clay before it dried. Clay gave way to animal skin scrolls marked with text, and then to papyrus scrolls. By 100ad the codex had arrived, but it was not until the ninth century that the first real paper book was produced. In Europe, paper was rare until after Gutenbergs breakthrough.
It took a few more centuries for e-books to emerge. They were first envisioned in 1945 by Vannevar Bush, director of the United States Office of Scientific Research and Development. In his classic essay, As We May Think , Bush described a gadget he called a memex -- a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications... Most of the memex contents are purchased on microfilm ready for insertion. Books of all sorts, pictures, current periodicals, newspapers, are thus obtained and dropped into place... Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them...
Although science-fiction writers eagerly adopted Bushs ideasnotably on the television show Star Trek , where portable electronic books featured regularlythe real world has remained loyal to paper. Only in the encyclopedia market, which was transformed by cd-roms in the mid-1980s, has the e-book made real progress. Far more encyclopedias, from Microsofts Encarta to Encyclopedia Britannica, are sold on cd-rom than were ever sold on paper, because they cost a fraction of the price and are easier to search. But attempts to broaden the appeal of e-book technology to ludic readers have been unsuccessful. Since the late 1980s the electronic publishing world has seen several failed e-book ventures.
Why? Most of them used devices that were either too bulky to carry around, or forced users to stock up their electronic library in inconvenient ways. Before widespread adoption of the Internet, there was no universal way to download new reading material. But the most fundamental problem was the lack of a display technology that could compete with paper when it came to ludic reading.
For paper books, readability depends on many factors: typeface and size, line length and spacing, page and margin size, and the colour of print and paper. But for e-books there are even more factors, including resolution, flicker, luminance, contrast and glare. Most typefaces were not designed for screens and, thanks to a limited number of pixels, are just fuzzy reproductions of the originals. The result is that reading on-screen is hard on the eyes and takes a lot more effort. People do it only for short documents. The longer the read, the more irritating and distracting are all the faults in display, layout and rendering.