You're making several fundamental mistakes. First, for a lot of what you read on your screen you have no choice. Where else are you going to read it? So the equation there is whether reading on a screen is better than not reading the particular material at all. Whereas with e-books the equation is whether reading on a screen (and the other benefits of e-books) is better than reading a physical book. Given some of the less than desirable characteristics of reading text on an LCD those benefits may not be enough.
Second, you probably spend a lot more time reading on a screen than most people do. If your day job involves using a computer all day (which I'll hazard a guess to a reasonable probability of such, given that this is hacker news) then you'll already have internalized and accepted the tradeoffs of doing a lot of reading on an LCD. But to someone who uses a computer say 1/10th or 1/100th as much as you do they have yet to come to that bridge, and when they do they have a choice as to the technologies they use for screen reading, the slight benefits of e-ink may be enough for them, even if it isn't for you.
There are a lot of computer users in the world who have yet to read, say, 1 thousand words of paragraph after paragraph of text in a single sitting on a device. To them the differences between reading text on physical paper, e-ink, or an LCD may be much more significant than for those of us who already spend our days staring at monitors and feel comfortable doing so.
You don't need to have a large screen for reading. It's more important that it's easy to page back and forth through the text - and that it reflows well and is easy on the eyes.
I watched someone trying to read Hacker news on their Android phone's web browser and it looked like the most horrific experience. Doesn't seem to put people off of smartphones though.
I partially agree and don't see why you were downvoted. If you don't want to browse the web, then the Kindle's screen is far superior for reading. The Kindle needs more speed, better resolution, and a better interface for hopping around in a book, but I always put it in my suitcase when I travel, and given the choice between reading a novel on the Kindle versus reading a novel on a beautiful bright color tablet like the iPad, I would choose the Kindle. A tablet that has an e-ink mode will have a very large advantage in my book.
I appreciate the effort and novelty that goes into things like this, but I would never, ever use such a thing. Sure I have a kindle that I read on, but I'll keep my 27" 5k screen for coding thanks.
Not for reading on a screen, but they're invaluable for making print copies, which I do in order to bind them into books. (Which has proven surprisingly easy to do!)
Lately I've been working to do my reading from paper, rather than from the same screens that bring all manner of distraction. So these days I always look for a PDF first, and I'm glad to know about the project you linked.
While I understand (and agree) that reading is more comfortable on paper than on a screen. I hope this doesn't mean you print out every e-mail and pdf and even sometimes websites, which still happens surprisingly often here.
But isn't reading much better on a larger screen? If all you do is reading, maybe you'll find yourself with an e-reader in a few years? Or a smaller tablet (iPad mini?)
To be fair, I also use screens for at least part of four of those things (not counting buying books on Amazon, then it'd be all 5) and plenty of people also use a screen for books (even if you don't count e-ink, which isn't light-emitting so probably shouldn't count as a screen in this context). You can do without them entirely all parts of those activities, obviously, but it's less convenient and/or more expensive, and depending on your goals or workflow may be entirely inappropriate (some drawing/art, for instance).
I actually dislike the space-filling aspect, but greatly prefer a physical book. Any chance there's an alternative to a screen that delivers what you want, I say take it.
I am currently reading books from the Humble Bundle ebooks collection. Just plain regular text books on my tablet is fine, but the comic ones (SMBC, XKCD) are not readable. It is nothing to do with the size, and everything to do with the tablet screen being 150 ppi. Being able to read that is not "utterly useless".
As you can see from many of the comments, people do want to buy higher pixel density screens on their laptops. Apple even came out with laptops where that is the distinguishing feature. But if your choices are outside of Apple then simply cannot buy high pixel density screens.
Laser printers when they first came out were 300 dpi. That is a very good indication that those kind of pixel densities make for better legibility. Sure you can read stuff at 75dpi, but it isn't as productive.
> You know the text is just as real if you read it from the screen?
It's not about the text being "real", it's about the UI of printed pages versus screens. You can use the space around you, and leverage spatial reasoning, better with paper. You'd need multiple really big, digital-pen-input-ready, high-res screens, plus some very nice specialized software, to come close to the same experience with computers—and still only kinda, for some situations but not others. Or you can just print a few sheets of paper at pennies per sheet and have a couple pens and highlighters around.
Physical paper is just another UI, and remains better for some things than screens are. Screens do have some advantages—you can't full-text-search the sheets of paper you have splayed over your desk or pinned up on the whiteboard or tackboard, of course, though given how good & fast OCR is getting, we might be able to do exactly that when AR eventually takes off. You can't have animations on a piece of paper. You can't back your paper up in the cloud. But you can also have ten pages visible all at once, with paper, and recall "I think that one part was somewhere to the top-left...". You can fold it. You can doodle on it. You can stuff it between relevant pages in a book. You can bundle related pages together with consistent ordering in a UI I that's quite nice for many purposes (AKA a binder). Put all those together and there are plenty of times printed pages beat screens (though, to emphasize again just to make this entirely clear, not always).
> Paper is also annoying to deal with. I've had an e-reader for 10 years but the odd older book isn't available. You'd think based on comments online that a real book is some magical wonderful thing, but they're an ass to use, heavy, large to store. Their only virtue is that they look nice on a shelf. But the other thing that looks nice is something other than a shelf.
From my perspective e-readers have exactly two killer features: space/weight savings (this one is, to be fair, a huge advantage, and is the only reason I have one), and not needing separate "large print" editions for readers with poor eyesight. The UI of paper books is, in practically every other way, better. Two pages visible at a time is great. Being able to easily hold open a couple different parts of the book at once is great. Full-text search is occasionally nice but a good index is, overall, better (to be fair, being an ebook doesn't rule out having a good index, but I find them far more awkward to use than in physical books). Commentary and notes and annotations and anything that leverages the fixed, physical space of the page, including things like thoughtful typesetting (especially noticeable with poetry) are all better in a real book. Endless customization is obviously nice in a lot of ways, but the flexibility of ebooks harm some use cases—it's no coincidence that a lot of non-fiction struggles with representation in e-book form, without resorting to fixed-size PDF.
IMO ebooks aren't a book replacement, they're a totally new format, and creating content that best suits them won't be identical to creating content that best suits books, and books that are simply format-shifted to ebooks are bound (ha, ha) to suffer in some ways for it. The most apt comparison I can think of is the transition from scrolls to bound volumes. It's not hard to think of ways that scrolls would have been superior to codices, and while ultimately the latter may have been overall-better and certainly did win out, they weren't universally and in all ways better. Ultimately, the space-savings thing may win the day for ebooks (again, it is a huge advantage) and print books may largely vanish, but it won't be because ebooks are strictly superior formats for reading.
Personally, I prefer reading words on a printed page over a computer display. Print offers much better resolution, a more natural way to read (for me), and I'm not distracted by email/blogs/work.
Because the difference in readability between an e-ink screen and an LCD is absurd. Yes, technically you can read PDFs on a netbook/laptop, but once you pass 20 minutes of reading, you start wishing you had a paper copy.
This is definitely the main point in this "debate"; some people will just prefer one screen type over the other. A lot of people seem to be advertising these opinions as objective fact, and that's quite a dangerous trend.
I'm personally of the opinion that e-Ink is what I'd prefer for reading, but I absolutely despise reading on screens; anything lengthy I print out. And while I think that e-Ink is better for reading, that's all that e-Ink devices (while being a lot cheaper than the iPad) do. If you read less and do other things more, then e-Ink is unlikely to even be an option for you unless you feel like shelling out for another device for the few times you do read at length.
I'd rather have a better screen than thinking about printing.
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