You're right, tall vertical columns are total shit on a screen.
But fixed-height horizontally scrolling columns are AMAZING: http://amarsagoo.info/tofu/ -- they work so perfectly on a screen when done well, better than anything else by far. The lines always stay in the same vertical alignment, and the columns in the same horizontal alignment, eliminating jitter -- the text changes without moving shit around.
Interesting. I'd like to see a video of that in action. I'm skeptical still, but I'm also a person who has no problem with the current status quo. I was reading books on my 160x160 Palm Pilot with little objection. This appears to make me an outlier. (I think it may because I started on the Commodore 64 on a regular television; against that reading experience, a clean 160x160 is still an improvement!)
Properly done that could work.
Do you use it? When you scroll over one or more columns, the system jumps column-wise, right? Not like a scrollbar would on a normal web page, which wouldn't jump to columns at all, and would have problems with half-displayed columns (which are useless).
I used to use Tofu incessantly when I used Macs at home + work, I've been meaning to write a clone in some X toolkit or XUL for a while.
You have it exactly right, it jumps one column at a time XOR one screen's worth at a time. When you first set it up you tweak not just the font + colors, but the width + padding of the columns.
I used to use it on my 12" PowerBook all the time, set up with one of the Vista fonts in light lavender on very-dark gray, with two columns fit onto the 1024x768 screen with the window maximized. I read millions of words that way, it's easily the fastest and least-fatiguing reading method I've used, though the ergonomics of the laptop ain't great.
But fixed-height horizontally scrolling columns are AMAZING: http://amarsagoo.info/tofu/ -- they work so perfectly on a screen when done well, better than anything else by far. The lines always stay in the same vertical alignment, and the columns in the same horizontal alignment, eliminating jitter -- the text changes without moving shit around.