Various types of hand-held electronic reading devices have been proposed to electronically display textual information for reading by a user. A typical hand-held electronic reading device includes a display device to display the textual information and a user interface which allows a user to navigate through the textual information and access various features of the electronic reading device. The display device and the user interface are incorporated in a hand-held housing to facilitate portability of the electronic reading device.
Some prior art devices include displays that require the user to scan across a line and sequentially read the words. This kind of display mimics that of the printed page of words, a direct consequence of the paradigm created by the Gutenberg's printing press. The intent of many of the existing devices is to emulate the scanning experience associated with reading words upon a printed page. Although some devices enable the user to increment the lines, one line at a time or several lines at a time or to continuously scroll the lines of words, the reader still has the same scanning experience associated with reading words upon a printed page. In this case the reader scans the first line typically from left to right with his eyes and then re-positions his eyes to scan the second line. The use of these devices and their requirement for constant scanning tends to tire the eye muscles.
Other prior art devices scroll the text of a message from left to right to eliminate the scanning motion of the eyes. This form of scrolling, can adversely affect the ability of the user to comprehend the message's meaning.
Thus there is a need for an improved method and device which can communicate messages whose length is not limited by the physical dimensions of the display screen and whose comprehension is not seriously affected by the scrolling techniques employed in existing devices.