Quote:
Originally Posted by Lo Zeno
That guy is simply trolling.
He say that a screen is "too small to read on" even if he hasn't even tried one. As if there have never been books with 4", 3" and even 2" diagonal printed through the history of publishing (I remember a series of "pocket thrillers" published in Italy that could fit the small pocket of your jeans, and people indeed bought and read them).
The last picture he posted, also, smells like trolling from a mile. What is "sad" about having a device 5" diagonal?
The market allows you to choose among 9" devices, 8" devices, 7.1" devices, 6" devices and 5" devices. You are free to choose what suits you best, you just have to decide if you value reading space more than portability or vice versa. Do you want to read on large screens? The kindle DX is there for you, go buy one.
If you call me sad for my choice, I call you intellectually impaired for your lack of education.
(My reading device actually has a 6" screen and not a 5" screen, but I am considering buying a smaller one for increased portability)
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Don't be so quick to call someone a troll. He's skeptical of the usability of such a device.
Further, e-ink screens are sufficiently low quality to make displaying the fine typefaces you get for pocket books quite a bit harder. I have successfully done a few books with 8 point typefaces, but getting much smaller is problematic visually, and the stout aspect ratio of the screen means that word spacing is harder to keep pleasant with small typefaces without a lot of additional hyphenation.
In trying to typeset for e-ink screens, I have bumped into a good number of frustrations myself. Forced margins in the display conflicts heavily with the device design, but lack of margins conflicts with widow-orphan removal. The squat aspect ratio means there's less room to play around with spacing, and short lines can be more irritating.
It's all a series of tradeoffs that have to be negotiated. Almost all net results are at a slight disadvantage though.
Further, with some languages, an open book is effectively a single page. When reading a vertically typeset Chinese book, for instance, 2 pages work together as effectively one broad page. This is really quite hard to simulate on a single-screen device like an ebook reader, and the screen overall is too small for a lot of publishing-quality books. Sure, it
can be used...but it's so far from ideal that many people find it somewhat unpleasant.