Newspapers can be extremely unreadable though for this exact reason. They often use 30 character columns, then have an article consisting of 5 or more such columns of text. I often "get lost in the sentence" when reading this format and have to backtrack. It would be interesting to know why they do this. It is definitely not readability.

I think on a mental level, the problem is that when the lines are this short, the grammar is extremely broken up, so you need to "cache" 4-5 lines of context to understand anything. When it's 80 per line, lines are parsed in a more independent fashion.

I think 70-100 is perfect, depending on other factors.

Screenshot of what I mean: http://www.trbimg.com/img-5667d3f6/turbine/la-la-na-menace02...