A Scotsman From Redmond, Washington, Walking Around Moscow With A Dell Hand-Held Loaded With Several Volumes of Books Safely Tucked Away In his Sporran – It Can Only Be Microsoft’s Bill Hill Promoting The Times Reader To An International Audience

But Bill Hill is no ordinary Scot. He learned to read when he was three and then tackled the full set of the Children’s Encyclopedia.

"I started reading for several hours a day, and I've never stopped since," Hill said. And this is the guy who is now co-director of Advanced Reading Technologies at Microsoft. His job and that of his cohort, Michael Cooper – talk about two opposites, he’s as American as apple pie including wearing a deeply conservative business suit to make his side of the technology sales pitch which also struck one as very un-Redmond -- are running one of Microsoft’s most important projects – the Times Reader that was introduced by Bill Gates and Arthur Sulzberger at the ASNE annual meeting April 28.

Hill and Cooper were in Moscow to show a live prototype of the Times Reader to the World Editor’s Forum, and it was pretty powerful stuff

Hill has spent much of his life trying to come up with the perfect reader-friendly screen and he is clearly enthusiastic with how the Times Reader displays copy.

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There is a paginated layout on screen so no scrolling up and down, left and right.). It utilizes ClearType, a software technology which Hill helped develop that improves text readability making words on a computer screen look almost as sharp and clear as those printed on paper. Studies have shown that people read it 5% more quickly and retain 2% more material. And finally with its adaptive layout it fits automatically to the size screen being used.

The Times content is sent to the PC via an XML feed, but there is no need for the user to be on the Times site to get the feed. The home page lists the major stories of the day and also contains tabs at the top listing the various sections – sports, financial etc. click on the tab and it brings up the headlines for that section. Archive copy will be available for seven days.

First impression was very positive. It looks the closest yet to having the Times home-delivered but not on paper; instead an easy-to-use digital format that makes the reading of the newspaper as fast or slow as one wants it to be.

What also caught the eye was the very clever way that advertisements are handled. None of the interfering pop-up ads that interfere with the reading experience but rather, as shown in the live prototype where stories were fed into two columns, the ad fits at the bottom of the end of the story. Small ad, if not much room, bigger ad if there is more room – it fits automatically. The ad also has an embedded link that allows the reader to find out more about the product without being connected the Internet.

The Times Reader is not the only such project out there, however. There’s already an ongoing trial of a system utilizing news copy from the Belgian newspaper, de Tijd on which Caroline Pauwels, director of Studies on Media, Information and Telecommunication at the Free University of Brussels provided some very interesting feedback from the 200 users in a real-life setting.

They had three main complaints: that the hand-held screen was too large – it didn’t fit in a woman’s purse, or fit into a guy’s pocket – (or Hill’s sporran -- that’s the leather bag guys wear outside their kilt to hold their money and other precious items, that the system was too slow in loading from one page to another, and the biggest complaint of all was that there was no search capability.

That caused ftm to ask Cooper about search in the Times Reader. He said that although he didn’t show it the Times Reader has an exceptionally sophisticated search function and as you type out what you are looking for headlines start appearing on screen and hopefully by the time you have finished typing the headlines left on the screen are exactly what you are looking for.

ftm asked Hill if there was anything he had learned from the Brussels study. He said it confirmed a lot of what they had already thought would be the case. He issued an open invitation for newspapers to get involved in the project and get themselves into 21st century technology by contacting him directly at Microsoft.