Quote:
Originally Posted by ahi
Many people on this forum--albeit definitely not all--seem to prioritize functionality that has little to do with the fundamental act of reading a book, and, in fact, cannot but have a detrimental impact thereupon.
A 6" screen is difficult to make work for content more complex than just plain old paragraph after paragraph novels, and a 5" screen is probably approaching impossible to do so. There is, of course, nothing wrong with prizing compactness and convenient portability in a device, but a 5" device will pretty much be useless for reading anything other than plainly structured novels.
The manga comics that (or, at least, some of their text bubbles) are just barely readable at 6" will be actually unreadable at 5". Books with even the simplest typographic complication will not be displayable in any reasonably correct way. Anything with a picture will be close to impossible to float text around--unless the picture is just decoration and is not really meant to be seen in any meaningful detail.
A book reader ( e or p) to me ought to be usable and useful for more than Charles Dickens and John Grisham. And, truly, the 6" screen just barely meets that criteria.
The ideal screen size for actually reading books a reasonably unrestricted variety of genres (many of which, I am aware, at this time are conspicuously absent from the market) is probably between 8" to 10". Perhaps down the road there will be a device that will be foldable to half that size when not in use and will thus satisfy both you and I.  |
I concur with many of your thoughs.
However, you can load up hundreds of pics on your reader, as well as hundreds more books. SO picture this. You are on the plane, a 14 hour trip. You'll have 8000-10,000 page turns on a full charge. You can read and read your regular books, and when you get bored reading, you can then switch over and annoy your neighbor with 8-level grayscale pics of your grandkids for the rest of the trip!!
The screen will be larger than most camera LCD screens, and a 5-inch 8-level greyscale will show better images than your 6-inch 4-level grey will.
I still await the 16- to 32-level greyscale reader with full-size screen, though.