James Felici’s piece, The State of E-Book Typography, brings into sharp relief some of the obstacles standing between e-books fully participating in literature at its highest and best level.

Essentially, reading on a screen – especially a computer (include tablet) screen, but also an e-reader – is always (using current technology) going to be less readable than even the cheapest printed dime store pulp.

Felici makes the distinction between readability and legibility. Legibility being the reason that most folks (including myself when I’m reading my Nook at Eastern Market or on the subway or on the National Mall) use the sort of font size on their e-readers that, in a traditionally printed book, would be associated with large print editions for the vision impaired. Just the other day, I had to increasee the font size I was using to read Melmoth the Wanderer, an earlier nineteenth gothic novel, on my Nook while riding the Metro here in DC.

But that doesn’t help, he says, the readability, which is limited by the pixelated technology used to create the words on the screen.

And though there some fonts that are better than others (Verdana, Tahoma, Georgia, Cambria) for use when reading on computers or screens, the limitations remain.

As a result we still read 25% more slowly on e-readers than on traditional books.

I also think of the writers, designers, and typographers who choose the font used in their books so carefully.

Especially poets, who are already crippled in their ability to transmit the true quality of their work in an e-reader because of how the devices lay out the lines. In a literary art form that is so much connected to its appearance on the page, the inability to even truly control the font size seems like salt in the wound, insult to injury, or whatever metaphor you prefer.

I’ll let Felici finish up this thought:

The problem today is that after 500 years of evolution, the “printed” word has taken a step backward in quality. According to “The New York Times,” electronic publishers are commissioning shorter books because their readers find it too tiring to take on longer works. Ever since I started writing for online magazines I’ve been obliged to write shorter pieces than in the past because editors tell me that online readers simply won’t finish longer articles. With today’s technologies, reading is simply more of a chore than it’s been in the past. Access to reading material is amazingly easy — a revolution, in fact — but reading is more than just taking in information, and the aesthetics of text presentation involves more than just making type pretty. It means making type functional as well.