I’m a girl who is in love with her books, all her books: super-sized art books, life-changing novels, and tattered, secondhand paperbacks from college.  I live with them in piles, on shelves, and lying randomly throughout my home. Then last year, to save trees, I started reading the newspaper on a tablet, and then, because it was easier than running to the library, I started reading newly-released books on a tablet, and then, when I was packing for a summer getaway and realized that I was, suddenly, freed from lugging a separate tote bag with magazines and paperbacks, I had a revelation.  Who really needs books?

Now I’ve arrived at a more moderate position. Last night I downloaded a new novel onto my tablet, settled into my couch, and was poised to dive in when I realized that this book looked exactly like every the other book I’ve ever read on my tablet. I’m ready to surrender the pleasures of a physical book for the convenience of a tablet: an evocative dust jacket, the satisfaction of moving through a stack of pages, and the comforting bulk of the thing in you lap. But I’m frustrated with the reading software my library uses, that reduces a book to a stream of text without graphic hierarchy.  This makes it possible to download an entire book in less than a minute, which is important for accessibility.  But it renders all books in an identical font and format, so that War and Peace  looks exactly like Huckleberry Finn looks exactly like Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?  The software offers ways for a reader to adjust font size, screen brightness, and page orientation, but none to adjust page width and line spacing. The software simply floods the screen with text, and wading through it requires a special tenacity. The New Yorker and McSweeney’s have luscious, graphics-heavy apps that capture the feeling of physical issues of those magazine, but they require downloading files that are a hundred times the size of a book on my tablet.  This is one solution. But there has got to be a middle ground, a way to set font, kerning and paragraphs within an easily downloadable text file, so that each e-book is something special.

Years ago I traveled into the city each day from southern Connecticut on Metro North.  Many of my co-commuters carried the New York Times with them in the morning and the New York Post at night.  The Times was for work and the Post was for pleasure.  It’s a distinction that’s reinforced by the tablet versions of these two newspapers.  The tablet edition of the Times is supremely elegant graphically; there’s a great deal of light and space on each screen.  But the links to almost all the articles – whether blurbs or features – are formatted in identical little squares with identical fonts.  There’s no clear hierarchy in the graphics to tell you what’s important to read.  And you can’t eye adjacent headlines and photos peripherally, as you can in the print edition, and circle through the paper this way.  It’s real work reading the day’s news items thoroughly on a tablet.

The New York Post, on the other hand, has developed a tablet version of their paper that preserves a great deal of the pleasure you get from reading it physically.  The splash page is simply a digital version of the print edition’s front page, with the same bad graphics and desperate puns (“Zoo-ccotti Park”), and the rest of the paper follows suit.  The tablet edition is an almost literal page-to-screen translation of the physical edition, with different news items, headlines and photographs crowded onto the same page. You can scroll up and down each column of print individually, which seems, somehow, more newspaper-like than swiping or tapping.  The  headlines (“He Woke Up from A Coma - Gay,” “Herm Made Her Squirm”) are rendered in the same monstrous, irregular fonts as in the print edition.  And there’s a navigation bar at the bottom that makes it easy to flip back and forth.  It’s the same trashy fun as the tabloid.