Quote:
Originally Posted by mouha
... nevertheless I just find the 6" screens really smalls compared to the books I usually read
...
I took 3 books in different formats and now I have a real and interesting measurement: the 6"8 screen is 3 lines smaller than a standard pockect book (compared to a page with all the lines of course).
...
Or because this format is still young in the ebook readers history (there were 5" !)
|
I have used 5" PocketBook 360° for quite a few years.
The 5 inch screen was big enough to read from very comfortably, yet, the device fits into a pocket. PocketBook 360° had a plastic lid that protected the screen very well during transport and could be snapped to the back of the device during reading.
There are two reasons I do not use it anymore: the electronics driving the screen started to fail and it doesn't have a front-light that I want. But a friend of mine still uses it for reading.
The firmware was very open, allowing us to install alternate programs for reading and set up what book formats are opened with what program. Everything was extremely configurable.
Newer versions of firmware have more and more features, but the openness and the configurability are eroded with each new firmware generation. I do not care about fancy new features, such as Dropbox integration if it means I can't set up my margins or text justification.
Even the newest generation of firmware is pretty good, mind you, when compared with other devices, but not as great when compared to previous generations.
Please note that you do not need to have wide margins around the text on an e-ink screen. You need margins on paper, because otherwise you wouldn't be able to bind a book or hold it open, but every e-ink reader has a frame around the screen that you can consider to be a margin.
Go ahead, take a standard fiction book and measure the line *length*. It has very similar length as the width of a 6" screen [in portrait orientation]. When you put your device into landscape position and set the margins to a couple of millimeters, the line length will be at least as big as in most fiction books. The number of lines on screen is not nearly as important as line length. There is such thing as an ideal line length. Make a browser window very wide and you will notice that reading text becomes extremely difficult - your eye will lose the track of where the next line begins by the time you finish previous one. If the line length is too short your eyes will skip too much. Go ahead and google up "the ideal line length in a book". There is even Wikipedia page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_length
We had 500 years to tweak it to perfection in the art of typesetting(*). Now count the number of characters in a well laid-out book and count the number of characters on a 6" screen with a really narrow margin (not like Kindle has).
Please note that it is much easier to turn a page on a reader than in a paper book. So what if the screen has fewer lines?
Why do you think the 6" size is so widespread? Just read a few books on a 6" device and you will see. I personally wouldn't trade the extra screen size for transportability.
(*) nowadays the vast majority of e-ink readers - with Kindle leading the pack - we are throwing the ancient art of typesetting from the window, skipping even such basic things like hyphenation ... sigh ...