Morning Coffee – 23 July 2018
Here are a few stories to read this Monday morning.
- Who wouldn't love a company that makes you a lot of money?
- Fonts are not the perfect solution to dyslexia.
- Did you know you can download the audiobooks sold in Google Play Books?
- The legacy UK publishing industry is doing okay.
- Elon Musk has finally paid the artist that created the farting unicorn art Musk stole.
The Dyslexia font issue reminds me very much of the (very minimal) studies purporting to demonstrate that reading on devices instead of books is bad for you in some way (sleep disturbance, degraded comprehension or whatever). Since there are inexpensive technical ‘solutions’ for devices (a new font, ‘night reading’ mode), while good research takes far more time and money to derive, vendors are only too happy to provide palliative solutions, to sell the next device or ebook to you, whether the science can justify it or not. Hard to blame them unless they cross the line and make actual claims that it cures dyslexia, insomnia, or some such..
I’m very much in favor of research Into reading but there is no reason to think it will yield significant gains in ‘reading effectiveness’ or whatever we can call it in general, beyond some narrow range of disability or limitations.
What we all want is to be able to read and comprehend with perfect clarity any book in any language in under a minute. Who is working on that one?