On the Kindle, if I switch from Los Angeles Review of Books Vol. 1 to a free copy of Middlemarch, I see no difference in how the text is laid out. Every book looks like every other book. A single, mediocre font is deployed for all purposes; at the same time, a barrage of supposedly reader-empowering configuration options get in the way of reading. It’s the worst of both worlds, as if the commissar in a Soviet bureaucracy of Literary Regulation is making the decisions in committee with a Silicon Valley techno-utopian individualist.

[ read the whole post at the Momentum blog ]