8月5日雅思阅读原文：Beyond Gutenberg_雅思英语阅读

8月5日雅思阅读原文：Beyond Gutenberg

　　Although science-fiction writers eagerly adopted Bushs ideasnotably on the television show Star Trek , where portable electronic books featured regularlythe real world has remained loyal to paper. Only in the encyclopedia market, which was transformed by cd-roms in the mid-1980s, has the e-book made real progress. Far more encyclopedias, from Microsofts Encarta to Encyclopedia Britannica, are sold on cd-rom than were ever sold on paper, because they cost a fraction of the price and are easier to search. But attempts to broaden the appeal of e-book technology to ludic readers have been unsuccessful. Since the late 1980s the electronic publishing world has seen several failed e-book ventures.

　　Why? Most of them used devices that were either too bulky to carry around, or forced users to stock up their electronic library in inconvenient ways. Before widespread adoption of the Internet, there was no universal way to download new reading material. But the most fundamental problem was the lack of a display technology that could compete with paper when it came to ludic reading.

　　For paper books, readability depends on many factors: typeface and size, line length and spacing, page and margin size, and the colour of print and paper. But for e-books there are even more factors, including resolution, flicker, luminance, contrast and glare. Most typefaces were not designed for screens and, thanks to a limited number of pixels, are just fuzzy reproductions of the originals. The result is that reading on-screen is hard on the eyes and takes a lot more effort. People do it only for short documents. The longer the read, the more irritating and distracting are all the faults in display, layout and rendering.