Scrolls?
Valamir:
side to side scrolling would absolute be easier to read (and AFAIK actually more common than long vertical scrolls).
But at that point you just have individual pages bound side by side in a long ribbon instead of in a stack...which strikes me as not nearly radical enough to justify such a radical form factor. Oh, you might get away with eliminating the margins and just have essentially a single page with 200 columns...but the experience I don't think would be dramatic enough to overcome the frustration of dealing with scrolls. The vertical orientation would be even more frusutrating to deal with but the impact would I think be even greater yet...such that if there were an occassion where the experience and coolness factor would outway the annoying factor...that a vertical orientation would be more likely to achieve that...but even that's a pretty big maybe. Scrolls are just really futzy to deal with.
David Artman:
I hear ya, Ralph--that's prolly why books replaced scrolls. :)
Another point or two, for shits and giggles:
* One must decide if the scroll will have sticks (or whatever they're called) and if it will have one or two. That would impact packaging and cost, but could go a LONG way towards evoking flavor.
* The practicality of a scroll might take a backseat to the aforementioned flavor, but it needn't in all cases--see my example above about dual-referencing, which would be easier with a scroll if the reffed material is longer than two pages for each referee. Another idea I just had, for example, is a map of a ringworld (yeah, yeah, how often does one need THAT?).
In the end, though, without leveraging the long, linear, sharable nature of a scroll, you've just got a gimmick. A cool, evocative gimmick; but not something that "uses" the scrollness.
This makes me want to finish Of Gods and Men, as that form factor would suit it very well (it's a highly staged game, which would fit my "scripted" notion above--scroll to World Building, the God Building, then World Morphing, then Disciple Placement, etc...).
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