A couple of months ago I spent a couple of months reading exclusively on my phone as an experiment. I like the Moon+ reading app and I had just acquired a Samsung Galaxy S5 phone with an AMOLED display, which, at least in theory, should be easier on my eyes than an LCD display and I wanted to see what I could learn. So for 2 months I did all my reading on either my LCD phone or my AMOLED phone.
I learned 2 things. First, that I can read up to about 30 minutes without eyestrain on the AMOLED screen while I'm limited to 15 or 20 minutes on the LCD phone. I already knew about that limitation on the LCD phone but the extra time I got on the AMOLED phone, the Galaxy S5, was good to know. That was one thing I learned.
The other thing was something I'd suspected for a while, that I read faster on a phone than I do on my Kindle. I didn't measure that. When I try to measure reading speed my focus is on reading at a constant speed and that's just not how I read so it doesn't mean anything to me. But I found that I read about twice as many books a month on the phone as I had been doing on my Kindle.
Anyway, after a couple of months of that test I went back to the Kindle, which is really my preferred way to read, and I slowed down again. I was spending as much time reading, maybe even a bit more, but reading about half as much. All of this is very much estimated. Nothing is measured. But I'm pretty sure I'm right.
So my last book, a pretty long and dense and rather fascinating book, was taking a while. That was okay because I was enjoying it, but it made me wonder. I began thinking of the differences in the phone and the Kindle and of course the obvious one is the phone has a much narrower screen, meaning shorter lines of text.
The Kindle has 3 margin positions and I've always kept mine on narrow margins, meaning wide text. It just seemed wasteful not to. While I was thinking about this last week, though, I remembered something I read a couple of decades ago when I was doing most of my reading on my Palm Pilot. We were having some discussions about the differences in reading on the Pilot vs paper books. This was a discussion among people who read a lot on their Pilots so it was mostly about differences and not much about preferences. Someone posted a link to an article from a very old newspaper or magazine, I forget just what the source was, about newspaper layout. As I recall it said that columns in newspapers were kept narrow to improve the ability to read quickly.
I did a little googling about this recently and didn't find that article or anything else that seemed to confirm that in any very convincing way. I found articles here and there on either side of that issue that all had good arguments.
Anyway I set the margin on my Kindle to it's widest setting, meaning narrowest text, and tried it, and wow! I was reading fast. I didn't like it much though so I changed it to the middle margin width and found that I still read faster. I'm not sure if I read as fast that way but I am sure it was faster than with the wide text/narrow margins.
Then I set it back to the widest margin/narrowest text again, deciding to try that a little longer. I realized that my discomfort with it was because I don't like wasting and I was wasting so much space. But that's a little bit like being bothered by better gas milage because it's a waste of gas tank.
Anyway I finished my book at lightning speed with narrow text. I even, on my phone, with Moon+ reader, widened my margins and made the text even narrower. Damn the torpedos! Full speed ahead!
I think the reason this works is because I'm gulping in a whole line at once and not scanning across the line. I'm not working at reading faster. I'm still reading at what seems the natural and normal speed. No focus on my reading speed at all. I just get more reading done. And I'm finding I'm even enjoying it more.
I'm posting this to start a discussion, not about the proper line width or about your prejudices or mine, or about how the page ought to be, but among any of you who try different text widths long enough to get past your expectations and see how it really affects you. I know how it's affecting me. I wonder if that's just me or if it's really a better way to read.
Any thoughts, for or against, will be appreciated. By the way I plan to copy this and post it in a couple of places. I'm not sure why I'm mentioning that. It just seems appropriate.
Barry