E-Readers vs. Tablets

I’ve been told, mostly by Apple’s marketing department, that something on the order of seventeen billion people prefer reading books on an iPad. I am not one of them. The iPad, the Kindle Fire, the color Nook, and all other tablets have backlit color LCD screens that refresh 60 times a second, basically strobing light into your eyes like the computer screens they are. These are not the same as e-ink screens, which are kind of like etch-n-sketch screens that don’t have to refresh unless you turn the page. So, e-ink screens refresh 300-400X less often than tablet screens, saving massive battery and being much more similar to printed words on paper as far as your eyes are concerned.

I went and read a whole book on my iPad 2 right after I got it. It was almost impossible to read on outdoors during the day. Indoors, it wasn’t long before it was hard on my eyes, just like reading for hours on a computer screen is, and trying to read in bed after a tiring day? Forget about it. The device itself was too big and heavy to be comfortable to read on, even in sideways “2-pages” mode, and I constantly worried about dropping it as I have often dropped the Kindle, which is a little dinged up but survives a lot better than a tablet like the iPad would. (If you carry anything around in one hand for 10-15 hours a day as you go about your business, you’re going to drop it every so often).

I also didn’t like the reading software Apple provided, which could not be configured to cram a lot of words on the page like you can choose to do on a Kindle or Nook. The Kindle Fire does a little better in this regard, but it is very heavy for its size and is still a flickering computer-type screen. The people who I know personally who read on these devices are not voracious readers. They are not bad people nor morons; they’re my friends, but they just don’t happen to read 250 books a year. They may read a novel every couple of weeks, and they like to look at colorful magazines and web pages, as. That’s what color tablets offer.

Still, I would rather read on a color tablet than lug around and trash physical books, especially when traveling. If I can choose a Kindle or Nook or other e-ink reader, I’ll do it every time. But even a tablet is more convenient to read on than “real” books because I can have a lot of books in a compact piece of gear I would have had with me anyway.

How does this change things for writers and publishers?