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Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
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Good link. I have to agree with Mr. Baker still...his points are legitimate and he doesn't paint himself as a hardcore Luddite at all. He's really just acting as a bit of an iconoclast, even though he namedrops another icon (iPod) in the interview.
Even the woman they asked regarding the screen admitted it wasn't pretty. People are so quick to defend its few good points that they want to casually ignore all the bad. Reminds me of a lot of trendy device adopters (old school like Moleskine notebooks to new tech like the iPhone) with confirmation bias.
Even the title of this thread implies a strong aggressive tone to criticisms, even when they're not meant that way.
As far as fonts that look good on the screen...there aren't any that look really good. There are ones that minimize the contrast problem and fit the pixel grid reasonably well, but nothing that can be described as "attractive" to anyone who can see individual pixels and the horrid smoothing combined with low contrast. That's a disadvantage of the screen technology. If your vision doesn't allow you to see it at normal reading distances, then more power to you. I unfortunately am not so lucky, and it has nothing to do with a faulty reader. In fact, the contrast in my PRS-505 is much higher than in some of the other readers I've seen (admittedly not many, since they're not sold in Taiwan), but even the best of the best is still pretty poor. Again, the quality is perhaps that of a photocopy of a fax, or an inkjet print on coarse bleedy paper.
I've personally talked quite a few people out of getting Kindles or Sony Readers...not because I hate them, but because I was straightforward about the problems. People deserve a reasonably complete impression, rather than just the happy. Imagine if Amazon eliminated all the 1-3 star ratings and only showed 4 and 5 for their books how many buyers would walk away feeling mislead and disappointed.