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that would be very annoying when reading on any touch based device. Even on a normal laptop - most people who can read well enough dont need to follow the text with the cursor anyways .. its just adds an unnecessary action that would work against the goal of this concept - speeding peoples reading up!

This is a great idea, a subtle mix of the gradients and some readers' select-a-few-lines-at-a-time habit.

Or, to mix in another idea (from philip1209) downthread: have the hover-effect add color-matched dots (or other glyphs) at the corresponding line-ends, currently under the pointer.

For me, that'd be completely unworkable.

Moving the mouse/cursor down the page line at a time to read? _Seriously?_

Applying the gradient when you select text might work. For some reason I already have a habit of obsessively selecting text when I am reading, and I've seen other people that do it as well.