Comment by _moof | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _moof | Hacker News Reader

I long preferred "real" books, despite having an e-reader for over ten years, but the e-reader has a killer feature: the backlight. Having a backlight means I can turn the light off on my nightstand, and read at night without keeping people up. (Yes, I know they make reading lights. No, I haven't tried one. They look like they're a pain.)

I also realized after looking over my (physical) bookshelves that I don't actually care about most of the books on there. This is after multiple rounds of clearing out the shelves and making trips to the secondhand bookstore, free library, etc., so it's not a matter of cruft. If I'm honest with myself, most books are "read once and discard," though there is a small collection that it feels distasteful not to keep copies of. Certain classics, or books with particular personal significance, for instance.

The cost of ebooks is an issue, as is the DRM. I haven't experimented with digital lending from libraries so I don't know if that's a solution to the cost problem, but it could be. DRM is... well, a perennial problem for digital media. And it does feel like something is missing in a world without secondhand stores and free libraries.

(Edit: It is in fact a frontlight, not a backlight. Duh.)

I read a lot during late evening / night, and for me personally, the best device for that is an Android smartphone with an OLED screen. This last bit is crucial, because OLED blacks are "true" in a non-emissive sense, so if you set it up for white-on-black (or better yet, orange or some other warm color), and dial the brightness all the way down, it is easy on the eyes even in an otherwise very dark room.

Unfortunately, some reader apps won't let you dial the brightness down enough - Kindle, most notably. "Screen filter" apps help with that.

Note: Check is the OLED uses lower PWM frequency for lower brightness if you sensitive for flicker. It's significant on darker situation.

https://www.dxomark.com/flicker-the-display-affliction/

BTW, I forgot to explain why Android specifically. On that OS, the apps can override the function of the volume key, and most readers - including Kindle - use it to flip pages. So you can hold the phone with your thumb on volume down, and read with minimal movement after finding a comfortable position. Ideally, this also needs a phone that is small enough to be held comfortably in one hand.

There's no similar feature on iOS, so you need to flick the screen to flip pages.

The backlight was a game changer for me too. There were times I used to use a headlamp to read when I'm hanging out at the porch to read.

I went through the same process about my dead tree collection, and shrunk it down to the ones that I either will read again, or keep around as a legacy. These days, the main criteria I use for getting a dead tree book is, "is this worth keeping and preserving in a zombie apocalypse?"

I'm 100% the same way in preferring dead tree books over my kindle. I almost switched over to kindle over the bedside table lamp keeping up my spouse until I got into very high end flashlights.

One quality of a high end flashlight is the ability to go very low in addition to very bright. Also they have high CRI and different reflector patterns. My preference for bed time reading is a Zebralight H503c. Goes down to .01 lumen. I usually keep it at 1 or .1 which is about the same contrast as a kindle on 2/10 backlight level. It has a "flood" reflector, meaning no reflector. Just a uniform wall of high CRI light from the LED about a 170° viewing angle with no hot spot. It is small, a single AA, and has runtime of months on low mode. I recharge the battery once or twice per year.

All e-readers can read DRM-less books. It's trivial to convert from a DRM free epub on calibre to a mobi or azw3 to use on a kindle, even. I've never felt too restricted unless I buy books directly from Amazon, because their DRM is far more strict.

I guess my point about DRM is more that the books I want to read are generally only available in DRMed formats. But maybe that's not true? I don't use an Amazon e-reader, for what it's worth.

There's a calibre plugin that removes DRM from most epubs and some Kindle books. It's a pain to set up, because you need old versions of Adobe Digital Editions and/or Kindle, and those run on Windows (I haven't tried them on Wine). But once it's set up, it works fine.

If you live in the US then you might check your local, public library. They've often got volumes of e-books (pun intended :) ), and you can borrow them for a while. Still DRM'd but an easy and free way to access books

It's going to largely depend on the publisher. The publisher, not the platform, controls whether the book is sold with DRM or not. The majority are, yes, although the one genre where that's generally not true is Sci-Fi. There was a time, at least, when most of the major sci-fi publishers opted not to sell their books with DRM, because they thought it was an abuse of technology. Not sure how much that still holds true, but publishers like Tor still sell all of their stuff DRM-free.

I've tried reading lights, but the backlight on my kindle is much better for preserving night vision. I think it may also make less of an impact on ease of falling asleep... just to add my $0.02!

I would definitely encourage you to try digital libraries. I’m in the LA area and have access to both the LA county and LA city libraries, and between those two I have access to the vast majority of books I’m interested in. It’s easy to connect to a kindle as well; I use the Libby app which connects to those libraries, and I can send books that I check out to my kindle in one click. The main downside is that popular books sometimes have a wait time, sometimes for several months. This happens somewhat often, but not the majority of the time.

I'm the same, I very rarely read a book twice. I think some of the Pratchett books are the only ones. Perhaps if I had a lot more time, or was a faster reader, I might, but for me there's always a new (for me) book that I would rather read.

I can see why people keep lots of books, but for me a book on a shelf is just a wedge of paper, I'd rather give it away and let someone else read it.

For me most of the books I keep are one of two things: - Books I want to lend to people - Books with visuals/ other weird structural things that need to be books

A few examples of the second are House of Leaves, S., and Understanding Comics

Ok, House of Leaves looks really interesting, I think I might have to make some time for that.

This is pretty similar to my POV. The front light is huge for reading in bed (or anywhere dark, like a plane). Also, you carry essentially every book in print with you, everywhere. But the biggest reason I find myself reading on my Kindle despite preferring real books is that on a Kindle, I can start reading that new book now.

I've never been able to do a backlit screen in an otherwise unlit room. I get eye strain so fast. The litte reader lites are great. $5 and clips to your book or headboard or nitestand or wherever you want, and the light is pretty focused on your book.

Technically ereader screens are frontlit: the glass in front of the e-ink display refracts light across the display evenly. So instead of looking right at a light source, you're viewing refracted light scattered across the entire display.

I also get a headache from backlit screens. Frontlit e-ink is much better.

The Kindle Paperwhite uses flattened fiber optics to bounce the light from the edges off of the epaper, so it is still more like indirect lighting than reading on a phone. In a darkened room, or when I am reading outside at night, it works pretty well. When I'm on a plane, or when I'm in a resturant, I don't have to fiddle with an external lighting device to read.

Frontlight!

Right, of course - silly mistake!

no, it's a backlight, the screen is lit from behind, backlit.

the light on your nightstand frontlights your paper bound books

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