Interesting. When I'm studying a piece of prose seriously, I often type it into my computer so I can break the sentences apart by clauses into separate, indented lines. It's amazing how much easier it is to see a sentence's structure and rhythm when aided by white space.

I don't know if I'd want everything I read formatted like that - the line breaks disrupt my train of thought. But as more text gets published in mediums that don't require that it be condensed to fit in a physical space, we might see a lot more of it.

Mechanical line composition for newspapers was based on a column width using about 1/3 the number of characters found in a browser rendered (10 pt.) line at if:book. Did they know something about legibility and immediacy of meaning? Did they understand an ergonomic of comprehension? Why did they also use an indent rather than a blank line return to prompt paragraphs?

I was impressed when I first saw it, despite my initial skepticism, and I'm impressed again. I used to speed-read as a kid. My reading skills, perseverance and speed have all since steadily degraded. Maybe this will get me reading voraciously again.

No, I don't like those line breaks. They change the text - they make a different book, not what the author wrote. Gives too much emphasis to the arbitrarily chosen last words on a line, and slides the work into a paradigm of "Poetry" that is very distorting.