Christian sent me a link to a Mac application, Tofu which presents text in a view with narrow columns of text so you scroll right rather than down. The application makes an interesting point about reading on the screen – why do we have to scroll down? The author, Amar Sagoo, puts it thus,
Tofu is a novel application to address the common problem that people don’t like reading text on the screen.
Why is that anyway? I believe there are two main reasons: line width and visual instability.
Text is usually very wide on the screen, which makes going from the end of one line to the beginning of the next difficult. That’s why newspapers have narrow columns: It makes them faster to read.