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Originally Posted by Sonist
Hm, most people tend to buy regular size books, rather than the various mini-sized novelty editions.
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That's because mini-sized novelty editions have lots of pages in a tiny space; they're hard to read because the paper curve makes the text in the middle hard to see, and hard to read because holding them open is a strain. A 3" screen doesn't have these problems. Plenty of people have no problem using 3" post-it notes all day long.
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A regular size trade paperback is 7 x 9 inches (17.8 x 22.9 cm), which is the equivalent of a diagonal screen size of 11.5 inches (29.2 cm). Which is larger, than the 9.7 inches screen of the Kindle DX.
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The layout difference between trade paperbacks and MMPBs is either larger text, or fewer pages. Occasinally, it's is whitespace--with the same text size, the book can have larger margins and be easier to hold open to read text on the inner-binding side of the page. These reasons don't apply to ebooks read on a flat screen.
MMPBs are (roughly) 4.25x7.25"; diagonal for the text, not counting the margins, is as large as about 7", and sometimes as small as 6", especially for young adult books. You don't need to look at the margins, because ebook readers have that part covered by hardware--there's already a place to put your fingers without overlapping the text, so you don't need to leave half an inch of whitespace around the words.
However, an 8" screen should provide plenty of reading space, and even allow a comfortable margin. A 5" screen would require adjusting to the idea of less words on a page, but not many less, especially for readers of some mainstream novels--many of the Harlequins released in ebook format have atrociously huge margins compared to what I'm used to.
However, there is no reason reading from a screen should be the same kind of experience as reading from a page, any more than seeing a movie in a theatre should be the same experience as watching a play. Early movies were basically plays-on-film; later movies expanded into activities that just can't be created on a stage. Early ebooks are still trying to re-create the printed page on a computer screen; later, people will get used to the idea that an "ebook reader" is as much a different format for reading as the differences between book/newspaper/magazine/trifold pamphlet, and adjust their expectations to match the medium.
And I expect they'll no more become standardized than cellphones or computers have... many features will be common to most, but there will always be both minimalist, cheaper versions, and exotic versions that have expensive, special-purpose features.