Another aspect of the paper 'UI' is physical location. In a lengthy work of fiction or history, a character may reappear after a long break. I can stick a finger between the pages I'm reading, and flip to scan through the pages to where I *believe* I
originally read the first reference. I have a good visual memory, so I may recall the shape of the paragraph, the place on the page where what I'm looking for can be found.
Regardless of how fast search is, it's still more of a pain on the PDA to drop in a bookmark, scrawl or copy/paste a search term, search, then flip back again (at least on Palm Reader -- I'd be happy to find more intuitive software). Perhaps hyperauthoring
that assists in linkages to a dramatis personae page; quick search by hilite and a gesture... I don't know.
I've been very willing to read short fiction on my Palm, especially in places where I have my PDA with me anyway, and (b) the quarters are tight. Examples include airplanes, on the can, and at the beach (Why is my PDA at the beach? Chance of geocaching. Yeah,
I've revealed geekiness).
The readability has varied from awful (Hugo Nominees in 2002 had munged special characters as html entites which didn't work in PalmDoc format) to excellent (recent Cory Doctorow fiction at
http://www.craphound.com). I've tried a couple of novels, but my PDA-based reading is sporadic enough that short stuff works best.
So what about laptop reading? Haven't done any. I've got a short work by Andrew Vachss (http://www.vachss.com) that I've never gotten around to reading because it's only in PDF. The laptop just isn't as convenient to read
on the beach, the can or the airplane seat (not when you're 2 meters tall, it ain't). And I've got plenty of 'real' books to read on the couch or in bed.
I had had ClearType turned on, and turned it off for some reason (probably when I had an external monitor attached), and so I turned it on again. Some things are beautifully better, such as the shadowed text on my desktop. Some things, though, are annoying:
bolded text in Outlook Express tends to have red edges, especially when there's tight horizontal frequencies, like "mail" or "bell." A few websites are unreadable with white text on light blue in a small font.