This is simply a wish from myself. Over the last few days I’ve been reading quite a few ebooks - free ones, purchased ones, ones on productivity, ones on internet marketing, ones on creativity, ones on ebooks.

Just about all of these ebooks - no matter if a report of a few pages, or a 100 - 200 page how-to manual, come in PDF form in a portrait orientation. Just like the white papers, documents and real life books and manual they are trying to electronically represent and look like.

There’s nothing wrong with this format - except for when you’re reading it. The amount of times I’ve swapped from Fit Page to 100% in a reading is beyond count on some of the bigger books. Fit Page makes the whole page fit into my adobe reader window, but this is especially small on a laptop screen, but at least gives me the bigger picture. 100% gives me the ability to read, but then I get into the whole scrolling problems. Scrolling on a laptop without a wheeled mouse is quite an effort, and I often end up scrolling down too far, to end up at the top of the next page without wanting to.

There was one difference in two of my many ebooks. Zen to Done and Personal Core Values are in landscape. And what a wonderful way to read an ebook! Each page is right there, at 100% and you can see all of the page on the screen. (Aside note : I don’t know if there’s anything to be read into here, but both books mentioned are on productivity, and formatted with a lot of sidebar quotes and whitespace).

Now, there are obvious pros and cons about each format - but even when viewing facing pages (two pages on the screen), the landscape orientated ebook is still as legible as any in portrait orientation. And I agree that the landscape ebook is still reminiscent of publishing powerpoint slides - which are in a similar orientation, but that preconception is easily waylaid with some good ebook designs. And sometimes landscaped paragraphs of text look too elongated with a waste of white space, particular with one-sentence text.

But landscaped orientation for ebooks (and for that matter, web pages and anything else we have to read) makes sense when considering our reading habits, and the current wide-screen formats of our television and computer monitors.

So spare a thought for this eBook reader, and design more of them in landscape, to save my fingers at least from all that scrolling.

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