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Originally Posted by DiapDealer
I don't think that's as true as it once was. I can't speak for the world at large, but I can certainly witness a change on these boards. More and more serious readers read on tablets/phones all the time (and not just in a pinch). I'm sure a majority of members still have dedicated eink devices, but we've certainly crossed the rubicon where a reader's "seriousness" gets to be called into question based on the screen technology of their primary reading device. Eink purists are about like pbook purists in that regard: a novelty that serious readers in general don't really have much time for. They just read. *shrug* I suspect the ereading world at large is changing similarly.
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Hell, D, I read on smartphones when I'm out and about. I confess, even though I have a larger smartphone (Samsung Note 9 or 10, I can never remember the number, just got it 3 months ago), but I very much prefer more words on the line. To me, reading on a smartphone--with the age of my eyes, that's a caveat--makes the lines too short, and it triggers that thing with lines far shorter than 60-66 characters/line. I guess if you're 18, it's fine, b/c you can make the font a crapload smaller.
Let me rephrase my answer--I don't think that anyone or any company knows the answer to that. Too diverse, too disparate, too many peoples and devices of various types. I tend to run a running poll of my customers. Now, frankly, MOST of my customers aren't eReaders--a fact that always makes me sad (not because I give a hoot, but because it makes MY job so much harder...), but of those that are, it's heavily majority eInks. Could it be that they're a segment of the population that bought eReaders early on, and don't upgrade? I guess, sure.
I tend to harken back to the "golden number" (yup, in typography too) for line-lengths, and there're reasons for it. On smartphones, it's very hard to reach that number. That's kinda the fundamental reason for my thinking. (Not that that impacts real tablets, of course. I have a Kindle Fire 10", which is actually a pretty decent tablet, although I HATE where they put the damn buttons for all the functions.) The golden number exists due to physiological reactions, to eye-flicks, at the end of the line, before the eye lands on the next line. I suspect that reading on the much-shorter line-length smartphones triggers the physiological reaction to those muc-shorter lines. {shrug}. That's my thinking.
Hitch