Word: readerly
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...PATENTS Jerome Lemelson Bar-code reader, computer-controlled tourniquet, audiocassette-drive mechanism, magnetic-recording system...
...between chapters; the stick shift takes you to the next book. Before you know it, your brain has become some kind of jet-powered Maserati. Reading regular text, you're considered fleet of eye if you hit 400 words a minute; on this device, known as the Speeder Reader, test subjects have been known to manage 2,000 words a minute...
Which doesn't mean we're all going to spend the 21st century treating books like NASCAR racetracks. But as an effective tool for cramming large chunks of information (the technology it is based on is already a big hit with law students), Speeder Reader is proof positive that we also don't have to treat books like slabs of paper that sit on shelves anymore. Printed text, which has remained basically unchanged since Gutenberg first got his fingers inky, is about to bloom into a thousand different forms. The one you use will increasingly depend on what you need...
Both Gold and Card have this aim in mind, but there the similarities end. Gold is deeply tanned, ponytailed and fast talking, with a background in experimental music and toy design. His group has spent the past couple of years dreaming up utterly outlandish text-display inventions like Speeder Reader. There's the Tilty Table, a vast and thin computer screen on shock absorbers that you tilt in any direction to scroll through a document that would in real life be 30 ft. across; Listen Reader, which uses tiny embedded computer chips to produce different ambient sounds on each page...
Gold's RED team seems to have reached the same conclusion: it's O.K. to skim, and it's O.K. to read pictures instead of text. Its Hyperbolic Reader (based on the hyperbolic tree, a Xerox PARC invention) tells a children's story in Perspective Wall style. Cartoons and speech bubbles grow large as you move a joystick over them, then shrink as you turn to another part of the story's tree. In Fluid Fiction (also created with PARC software), another children's story is told in just 24 sentences. But touch the end of any sentence...