Why the Kindle and Sony beat the iPhone for ‘immersive’ reading

Paul Biba from TeleRead has written up a few points on why e-Readers beat mobiles when it comes to immersive reading.

Here are the points Paul found after prolonged reading on an iPhone:

1. For some reason I don’t find it as “immersive” as reading on the Kindle. I suspect that the smaller screen allows for more peripheral vision which is perhaps more distracting than the Kindle, or Sony Reader, which have a bigger field of view and so cut out more of the distracting rest of the world.

2. I find the backlit screen to be much more tiring on my eyes than the Kindle or Sony. Because of this I switched eReader to have a black background with white text, and I find this more soothing. It is to be hoped that Fictionwise will allow other colors for use in the background. On my Palm TX I found that a pale yellow or blue background cut out the glare nicely.

3. I find the “thumb taps” that change pages to be very annoying and rather tiring on my hand. I can feel the strain in my thumb after a while. A simple button press, which is how you change pages on the Kindle or Sony, seems to be much more ergonomic, at least for me, as it requires much less in the way of motion. Of course, this is a limitation of the iPhone and not something Fictionwise could do anything about.

Summarising the experience, Paul feels that e-Readers which are dedicated to reading an e-Book, provide a much nicer experience, however when it comes to getting content read; having an iPhone along with some good content implementation has its attractions.

[ TeleRead ]

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