Reading Today
The dawn of the post-literate society and the end of civilisation
The Idea Machine: Putting Socrates’ Prophecy to the Test
The post-literate society is not inevitable
My somewhat wasteful technique for avoiding the distraction and eyestrain of reading on my phone or laptop is to select "Reading Mode" on my browser, and then print at four pages per sheet layout, double-sided. This puts the article in a handy quarter-sized format that is easy to pocket, hold, and read, with minimal waste. Too many articles if printed straight from the web include all the sidebars, headers, footers, and advertisements, and end up being 12 pages for what comes out as two or three in my method. The downside is that Substack articles in particular lose their paragraph headings and all links to other creators, so when those are essential to the text it can be hard to follow. I appreciate writers like Peco and Ruth Gaskovski who provide pdf versions.
It's fairly easy to create a CSS which will provide a printed format clean of extraneous content and which adjusts the font for printed readability. If I ever get into generating long-form content, I will be sure to include it. (I'm not sure how to implement this in bearblog, but I'm confident I could figure it out when needed.)
@media print {
.noprint {
display: none;
}