Quote:
Originally Posted by Quoth
Most people use eink ereaders for novels that are 100% black & white text (so Regal mode works well) and few or no illustrations and would spend maybe less than 0.15% of the time looking at the cover.
I've no objection to colour eink being sold as well as mono, but it's not a substitute for mono and will be replaced by LCD/OLED/QLED with matt screens. It's also misleadingly described and marketed. Few people buying colour eink will be negative as they likely would not have bought it. So those happy with colour eink are not representative either of the majority of ebook reading people (who don't use eink at all) or of those reading on eink.
I doubt more than a couple of the last 1000 books I read had any colour content. The Beatrix Potter omnibus has colour, but a 7″ colour ink wouldn't do it justice.
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I do not claim that my opinion is representative of anything. I am simply explaining how I use my e-reader and why it is interesting for me to have colour. All pages of 100% of my books have colour because the header, footer and progress line have colour. The notes have colour, the quotes have colour, the chapter titles have colour, the underlines have colour, the dictionary has colour, the translator has colour, Wikipedia has colour.... And I could cite a good number of elements of the text in which I have colour. I set the colour and I choose it myself because that's why I bought a colour e-reader: to have colour. If I had a monochrome e-reader, which most people have, I wouldn't be able to do that.
People want to read novels in black and white? That's fine by me. We are children of the printing press and the mass dissemination of culture. We are used to it. Just as we are used to seeing magazines or the calendar we have hanging on the wall in colour and not in black and white. It's a question of habit and the impossibility of doing it any other way. It is not so clear to me that it is a personal decision.
One of the things that has always attracted me to e-readers is the possibility of going beyond what physical books offered me. To be able to change the font and its size, the margins, the line spacing. Being able to use a dictionary and a translator. To be able to do things I couldn't do before. And one of the things I've always wanted to do is to give colour to certain elements of the text. And that's something that a colour e-reader now allows me to do. I find it very nice to use and see colour in my books. Is it necessary for reading? Of course it is not. Nor is it necessary to use an e-reader to read novels. In fact most readers still read physical books. But I have long since stopped being guided by the majority's criteria in these matters.