Back-lit e-readers 'damage sleep and health,' doctors warn | Hacker News Reader

Back-lit e-readers 'damage sleep and health,' doctors warn

bbc.com

35 pointsleephillips75 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8787218

From the paper itself (highlight mine):

> During LE-eBook reading sessions, the light-emitting device was set to maximum brightness and placed in a stand that held it at a fixed angle. This stand was placed on a table directly in front of the individual at a 30- to 45-cm distance from their eyes. Participants were allowed to turn pages on the LE-eBook, but were asked not to hold it while reading or make any adjustments to the settings. During the printed book reading sessions, participants were allowed to hold the book at any desired distance from their eyes.

Is this anything new anyways? Shining bright blueish light into people's eyes before bedtime has got to be a well researched topic already. This feels like media-tailored hype while a simple "yes, back-lit ebook readers use this kind of light so those existing findings apply" would have sufficed.

Bad science combined with terrible reporting from the BBC where "light emitting e-book readers" become in the headline "e-books"...

"They found it took longer to nod off with a back-lit e-reader, which led to poorer quality sleep and being more tired the next morning."

So going to sleep later means you get less sleep and are more tired the next day. This is not a shocking revelation. I'd also be curious what they think about frontlit eReaders as opposed to backlit.

You stripped the context from the quote... They're not comparing going straight to sleep vs using an before bed e-reader.

"A team from Harvard Medical School compared reading paper books and light-emitting e-readers before sleep."

A bit more important context, by "light-emitting e-readers", they really mean iPads positioned at a fixed distance with a fixed brightness.

Feels like a rigged experiment to me, frankly. "I hypothesize that reading on an e-reader has a negative impact on your sleep, let's design a study which shows exactly that."

On my laptop, I've been using f.lux [0] to prevent the bright monitor lighting from keeping me too alert late into the night. It took me a while to get accustomed to the hues, but I really like the way the light softens as the evening progresses.

[0] https://justgetflux.com/

There is also Redshift [0][1], which I've found easier and simpler to use/install on Linux (but I've researched f.lux long time ago, so things may be different now). I remember that at first I couldn't stand that everything was kind of orangeish, but after a while I honestly didn't notice it anymore. From my personal experience, I can tell that it really made my eyes suffer less from long sessions of copmuter use.

[0] http://jonls.dk/redshift/ [1] https://github.com/jonls/redshift

I love f.lux. It would be nice if you could run it on iOS without jailbreaking.

This is one of those comments we'll look back on in 30 years and say "what the hell were we thinking letting a company control our devices like that?".

Do you miss the days where you had to manually adjust the choke while driving and decoke the engine every few thousand miles? I think we're going to look back on computers of the 90s and 2000s with a similar quaintness. More people care about a bullshit-free computing experience than an abstract concept of "freedom".

I think it's not a true comparison - freedom to modify your hardware doesn't have to imply that it's a hassle to use such hardware.

In other words: does "bullshit-free computing experience" (or let's just say usability) have to exclude freedom (i.e. your options to freely modify hardware/software you own/use)? I'm thinking about that for some time and I think that (as most of the things) it's not a objective thing but dependend on the philosophy of the producer/maker. And I'm sure that there are people who want to produce well designed things (be that a phone or an app) that can be modified by users/owners (here comes the topic of ownership in the light of digital world, but that's another thing).

Is there a better way to prevent malware than a pretty basic review process (iOS/Mac App Store) and data sandboxing?

And to continue the car analogy, lots of car modifications are illegal for safety and public health (smog) reasons. I think computers are headed in the same direction in the next 40-50 years. The children of tomorrow will think it's absolutely bananas that we used to run unsigned code, because malware behaves much like pollution.

I think sandboxing is a quite good solution, but it doesn't mean that you can't have a root access. Consider jails in FreeBSD, where you can isolate a single process but at the same time you have a control over whole system.

Your car analogy can provide insight into the consequences of a single insecure system in the network, but at the same time it's not valid when you consider that you can (should) control your systems and network if it has to fit your needs.

Yeah but when we can't make the computers do what we want it is a problem.

I wish I could love flux. I've tried it many times and want to use it but when I watch a movie at night it makes it look bad. If I turn on the new 'movie mode' my screen flickers quite a lot. I end up disabling it for the duration of the movie which kind of defeats the purpose of having it.

I'm puzzled by the movie watching use case. When I watch a movie I always want to see it reproduced as accurately as possible, even at night.

I use it when working evenings or nights. Writing code or reading documentation is a much more soothing experience with it enabled for me.

>> "When I watch a movie I always want to see it reproduced as accurately as possible, even at night."

Exactly. I turn Flux off during the movie so I feel that any benefit it would provide me is wasted as my reason for using it is to help my insomnia. It's definitely nice when coding but the major reason for me using it seems wasted because of the movie :)

You can disable f.lux for specific applications. I do that I'm watching a movie as it just isn't the same when everything is orange. At least that way it's still on for the apps you need when coding etc.

It looks like all it does is make colors look terrible, it doesn't actually change the brightness (intensity of the backlight) which is the actual problem. Shooting 200 watts of light right into your eyeballs is bad regardless of how yellow it is.

The key here is "Light Emitting" rather than eBooks. So the title is more than a bit misleading since it's mostly tablets that emit direct light. The experiment specifically used an iPad in comparison with a paper book. Seems odd to generalize it to all eBooks.

This article[0] seems to have a more accurate title.

[0] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/12/141222131348.ht...

>So the title is more than a bit misleading

I already made a comment here some dutch news thing that picked up on this and debunked it. It's weird to see it on HN this late and this upvoted.

Technically it's not misleading.

Why not? Let's grab Wikipedia's definition: "An e-reader is a mobile electronic device that is designed primarily for the purpose of reading digital e-books and periodicals." e.g. there is being made NO distinction between e-ink displays and normal LED displays (iPad, tablets, screens and the sort).

It's kind of misleading because people usually think of e-readers as e-ink display type of e-readers. But this is only a small subset of the 'actual' e-readers.

Conclusion? Don't stare at a light emitting screen (iPad, TV, PC) before you go to bed. Read from an e-ink display or a book.

I, personally, am still waiting for the day that 60 Hz e-ink PC monitors will be available.

I think it's fair to say that an iPad was not "designed primarily for the purpose of reading digital e-books and periodicals."

Ironically, its size and backlight make it very poor for that purpose, but its ubiquity makes it easier for the iPad to fill the role of the e-reader in addition to its multitude of other roles.

The title on HN was edited. It used to say what the BBC article title still says which is "E-books damage sleep..."

From Doc linked from the page: "Dr. Czeisler received royalties from McGraw Hill, Penguin Press/Houghton" [1]

It's shaming of the BBC not to have dealt with the findings more critically, rather than regurgitation of the press release. The characterization of iPads as e-readers in the context of the royalties looks suspicious.

[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/12/18/1418490112

He's the fourth author and receiving royalties from publishers for use of his intellectual property (at some unspecified point in the past) probably isn't uncommon for a leading researcher in a field, particularly one that is employed by Harvard Medical School.

I'm not saying the paper is necessarily without its faults because of who he is (again, noting that he is only the fourth author of the paper), but implying that the paper was somehow funded by the publishing industry seems misleading at best.

Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a winner.

> Our bodies are kept in tune with the rhythm of day and night by an internal body clock, which uses light to tell the time.

That body clock has been completely destroyed the day we started to use lamps and night and even more since we use Electricity. It's fine to say it's bad for your health, but seriously, being exposed to bright light until late at night is nothing new at all. And so far the Human race still endures.

Homo sapiens - ~250,000 - 400,000 years old

Electricity for lighting - ~120 years old

It's pretty new.

I'd rather submit to you it's BECAUSE Homo sapiens mastered Fire AND Light that we have become a dominating specie. So, it may have damaged our health in the process, but it has been massively beneficial for our survival as a whole.

So why aren't fireflies our lords and masters?

Because fireflies do not master Fire.

Campfires, candles, torches...?

...are all much dimmer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0ES9TKAf_4

who cares how dim they are, they enabled Humans to be active at night and therefore disrupted that day-light body cycle. Which is what the comment was about.

You said "being exposed to bright light late at night is nothing new" which is demonstrably false.

No, a petrol lamp was bright enough to read at night and study way longer than what the sunlight could bring you. I'm not sure what you are trying to argue with - do you think modern society just started 120 years ago only?

"Bright enough to read" and "bright light" are very different, that's been my point since the first comment. We've had "bright enough to read" for a long time but only in the last 120 years has it been possible to have actual "bright light" late at night.

We are not arguing about the same thing then ? My comment was specifically about the fact the day-light cycle had been disrupted for a very long time in human existence already. Not matter if lights were dim, using a petrol light after dark is already disrupting that cycle. Or do you contest that?

I am, because if a dim petrol light disrupted our sleep cycle, we would have seen sleep cycle changes sooner than 120 years ago. Instead they're correlated with the spread of electric light.

But there's ample data in literature about people doing stuff at night even back in the Middle Ages. So now, explain me - if people were sleeping later at night instead of sleeping as soon as the sun goes down, how did that no impact their sleep cycles?

you think we waited for Electricity to use Light? Ever heard of Prometheus?

Electricity is dramatically different from torches/candles. It's brighter and safer, so it got used more. It affected how we sleep:

http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/why-broken-sleep-is-a-gol...

> Prior to Edison, says the Virginia Tech historian A Roger Ekirch, author of At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past (2005), sleep had been divided into two distinct segments, separated by a period of night-waking that lasted between one and several hours. The pattern was called segmented sleep.

> Sleep patterns of the past might surprise us today. While we might think that our circadian rhythm should wake us only as the sun rises, many animals and insects do not sleep in one uninterrupted block but in chunks of several hours at a time or in two distinct segments. Ekirch believes that humans, left to sleep naturally, would not sleep in a consolidated block either.

> A Roger Ekirch, author of At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past (2005), sleep had been divided into two distinct segments, separated by a period of night-waking that lasted between one and several hours. The pattern was called segmented sleep

I'd like to dispute that claim (I have read the article) and I had been in touch with people who lived before Electricity started being used and none of them mentioned anything about a two-segment nights (actually refuted it). This may have been the case in certain circles but I suspect this was not a thing for everyone in society.

The point made here is that when you hold a back lit e-reader you're literally staring into the light.

Unless you're staring directly into the lights which light your home for long periods of time it appears to be an appreciable difference.

However, I had thought back lights were well known for preventing strong sleep cycles before this.

How about TV then ? It's not so popular nowadays but people used to watch TV until they went to sleep, late at night. That was even worse than LCDs or e-Ink backlights.

Hmm, maybe it's because of the proximity of the screens? I hadn't considered TV. Interesting point.

TVs were much brighter than LCDs and directly throwing electrons at your eyes on top of the emitted light. I can' fathom why they would have been more harmless than a tablet in 2014.

Yea, all I can figure is the 14 inch proximity from face.

Perhaps the electrons don't matter as much as the relative dispersal of light.

When you look at a tv from 8 feet away or so your peripheral vision can generally see a lot of things that aren't blasting light into them. That's not so much the case for me right now staring at my monitor.

Pure speculation from a tired man ;-)

E-book readers with a backlight 'damage sleep and health'.

Headline is definitely a bit click-baity. "Hmm, how can we write a story about how bright lights mess up your body clock, but not make it as boring or mundane? I know, we'll say e-books are the culprit!"

You know you're reading a quality article when one of the subheadings is literally just (quotation marks and all) 'Concern'

I prefer the non backlit ones anyway - much more like reading a paper book. I suppose the drawbacks are also the same as paper books in that you need a light to read by

Dozens of comments here assume that there is an important difference between reflected light that enters the eye and light shining "directly" into the eye. It's obvious that spectrum, intensity, flicker, and other properties of the light can have an effect on us, but what difference could it possibly make, aside from these factors, whether the light is reflected or "direct"? Why is there an essential difference, everything else being equal, between backlit and frontlit readers?

Reflection off anything but a perfect mirror has a significant effect on spectrum, intensity, flicker, and other properties of light. So, given the limited set of available artificial light sources suitable for inclusion in an e-reader (which limit the starting set of options for those properties before considering reflection), even if there is no essential difference in the abstract between reflected and directly-emitted light in terms of the human effect, the effect of those properties likely creates an important difference between practical reflected and direct lighting in e-book reader devices.

The comments that assert (not "assume") that there is an important difference between reflected and direct light in portable e-book readers largely expressly note that the difference they are discussing is in that context, and neither assert nor assume a fundamental difference in reflected or emitted light in general. If you could make a back-lit reader that simulated a front-lit reader in all relevant features of the light reaching the eyes, it is obvious (tautological, even) that there would be no difference in the effect that light had -- but in real-world devices, "everything else" isn't equal between front-lit and back-lit devices, and the issue here is the effects of real-world devices, not hypothetical devices that exist only in thought experiments.

I'm not changing my habits from a study based on 12 people.

Hasn't this already be researched quite a lot with Laptops and PC's? I thought it was common knowledge now that the light emitted from those devices would effect your sleep. A sample size of 12 isn't good but I'm sure there are much more comprehensive studies that have already been done on this. I think they're the reason apps like Flux exist.[1]

[1] https://justgetflux.com/

Good Man. Unfortunately, lots of piss-poor researchers out there write study reports with very small n sizes, and 12 is not the worst one I have seen.

Meme-science. What about those laptops people staring at for 8 hours/day and those 50" back-lit TVs running 16h/day? Do they contribute to a "health-damage"? To what extend? How do they factor out "stress" from being a subject in a "study" from "stress" of being exposed to deadly back-lit?

"Methodology" aside. Let me guess - the "study" has been sponsored by affiliates of e-ink display producers/sellers?

It's a shame https://justgetflux.com/ isn't available in the App store. As far as I know you have to jailbreak to install it (so it's not a technical limitation per se).

Can anyone think of a good reason why Apple doesn't ship with f.lux like software by default? It's pretty much a necessity for using a computer device at night.

Because all it does it makes your colors screwy, it doesn't actually help anything?

"They spent five days reading from a paperback and five days from an iPad."

... and proceed to show a kindle in the pictures.

Of course, the iPad has a screen so it's going to damage your sleep. The refresh rate + bright blue light is bad for you. Why did they need to make a study for that? That's know.

What I am wondering is a backlight e-ink display. No refresh rate, and a dim backlight. Now, that's a study that is worth it.

Can people at least stop saying that f.lux does nothing? I have used it for like a year now and it has profoundly improved the length of time I can look at my computer screen. Also once I started using it I didnt have the slight double vision you get from staring at bright blue light for long periods. The study may be shit, but f.lux is effective.

I still keep around a few halogen and incandescent light bulbs for the evening.

They emit a better light (color temperature) than fluorescent & LED lamps (and contain no hazardous waste). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_temperature

I asked a friend of mine and Kindle engineer for an amber-hued backlit kindle about six months ago. He thought it was a good idea, so maybe we'll get one in another year or so.

I've got a Kobo Aura HD, and notice no difference in sleep quality compared to reading a normal book with a light on. YMMV, of course.

Misleading. Reading from an iPad is not the same as reading from an e-ink device.

Misleading title, it's reading ebooks on a tablet that's a problem, just like doing anything else at night on a tablet or laptop. Reading ebooks on an ebook reader with an eink screen is fine.

Agreed. This is terrible journalism - no differentiation between e-reader and what is essentially a reading application on a standard backlit tablet. It even goes on to say that non-backlit screens (i.e. Kindle e-readers) are fine and the same as a book.

The new Kindles (Paperwhite, Voyage) are backlit. If that trend spreads to other e-readers it won't just be a tablet problem. I guess this is a good argument to keep the old style Kindles around.

The Paperwhite and Voyage are front-lit, not backlit. They should be fine.

This article on what I assume was the same study http://arstechnica.com/science/2014/12/e-readers-and-tablets... mentions specifically "iPads, Kindle Fires, and Nook Colors", and also says "A Kindle without a backlight, as you'd expect, only reflected about as much light as a book and had its peak omission in relatively red wavelengths."

Paperwhites are not backlit.

"Paperwhite guides light toward the surface of the display with its built-in front light—unlike back-lit tablets that shine in your eyes—so you can read comfortably without eyestrain."

Source: http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Paperwhite-Ereader/dp/B00AWH595...

Illustration: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/12/26/technology/lig...

Interesting, thanks for the info. The article specifically calls out 'original Kindles' as being ok which led me to believe the Paperwhite could be an issue - however that might have been referencing the Fire.

Except that you can vary the amount of backlight on a paperwhite. Surely that makes a difference?

Complete first half of the article is misleading :( Only when they describe the actual experiment you get the real information:

> They spent five days reading from a paperback and five days from an iPad.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com