Quote:
Originally Posted by frankrec
Why do ebook reader reviews rarely give a good indication of how good the readability quotient of the reader is. Many of us buy ereaders to read and wish only to have a defined measure of text clarity. The contast figure alone does not that as it is greatly impacted by the various layers and the screen type. I do not need the ability for my ereader use a pen, I just need to read text and have text displayed clearly. From the reviews I should be able to tell if a kobo forma or a kindle Voyager has a better display.
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I suppose I should open by asking what the heck you mean by a readability quotient. The ones I'm familiar with such as the Flesch reading ease and Flesch-Kincaid grade level have little to do the with physical media and much to do with sentence structure, sentence length and word choice. Outside of K-12 education, no one seems to pay much attention to those results.
One possible reason that ereaders don't give readability quotient has nothing to do with text clarity or any attribute of an ereader. Use short sentences and words and you get an excellent readability quotient. Use longer sentences, longer words and suffer a low readability quotient. Most ereaders can vary the font, font size, line height, line length (varying the margins), etc. giving those items pretty much negligible relevance when it comes to ereaders.
A while back, just for the heck of it, I ran Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet through a version of the Flesch reading-ease test. It came up with a score of 21. I ran one of the old Dick and Jane books through the same test, it came up with a score of 98 (it was a pain typing those sentences). Which would I rather read?
I also ran one (or was it two?
) sentence from David Edding's
The Seeress of Kell through the test. Score was 17. Admittedly, the sentence was spoken by a Mimbrate knight and as one comment in the book: "
I spent some time at Vo Mimbre," Garion told him.
"You can pick up their speech after a while. About the only problem with it is that the sentences are so involved that you sometimes lose track of what you’re saying before you get to the bottom end of it."