[II2II]

> Any slightly lengthy text will just bury you in a desert of letters.

Is this a bad thing?

Books are a "desert of letters", with little to break the text up outside of chapters, sections, and paragraphs. If you broaden the scope a bit, you can added illustrations and photos. People have been reading books for generations. While many books do break that mould, many books continue to follow that tradition.

[PurpleRamen]

> Is this a bad thing?

Depends on the purpose. For a Webpage, which is a collection of short texts, to sell you on something, it is bad.

> Books are a "desert of letters"

Depends on the book. A phone book would be a desert of letters, I don't think many would enjoy reading them. Something like a novel, would be a forest of chapters, full of trees with letters arranged in a meaningful way, leading you on a road toward a goal. But a webpage is not a novel, it has an informative purpose, and is full of little small texts of equal value.

[skydhash]

I use a rss client which has a content view, and it's barely different than what gemini offers. I also read plenty of epubs and while inline images are possibles, it's often looks really bad. I think there's a value on prioritizing content over forms. Some contents won't fit to these restrictions and that's ok. It's not like it's a web replacement, just an alternative whose restrictions create some kind of exclusivity.

[troupo]

Have you actually seen books? While typographic traditions did go down the drain in the recent decades, it's still hard to find a domain as varied as books.

Even the most boring books often have things that Gemini purposefully omits: from styling to inline illustrations to diagrams to insets, asides, footnotes, tables of content, just tables, typographic marks etc. etc. etc.

[giantrobot]

> Books are a "desert of letters", with little to break the text up outside of chapters, sections, and paragraphs.

You're forgetting pages. The fact pages physically limit the visual bounds of all the letters helps people read them. The words from page 6 aren't going to come into view while you're reading page 4 but scrolled down a little too far.