Stop Reading Books on Your Phone
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Stare at your phone or laptop long enough and you’ll likely get a headache. While it’s true that staring at anything for a long period of time can cause eye strain (as experts told us in our guide to thebest blue light blocking glasses), staring directly at a bright light is especially bad. It can throw off your circadian rhythm, making it harder for you to fall asleep, and the backlights on OLED and LCD displays (found on smartphones, tablets, and laptops) can be particularly strenuous in low-light settings where you might often want to read.
That’s why I use e-ink displays for all my reading. Unlike the bright backlights that illuminate all our other devices, the front lights used one-readersdon’t shine directly into your eyes while you look at the screen. Instead, the screens are lit using an array of lights that are pointed toward the display — sort of like shining a flashlight down onto a book — and the text itself is made up of real ink. That makes them far superior for a variety of reasons.
E-ink is just easier to read — in both broad daylight and dim light.
Blue light, which can be found in nearly any light source, can bedisruptive to your circadian rhythmwith overexposure too close to bedtime. This is especially true of emissive displays — screens that produce their own light without any filter — such as smartphone displays, as they reflect ambient light in addition to the light emitted by the screen itself. Additionally, because we hold our phones so close to our faces when using them, the impacts of that blue light are more intense than looking at a TV for the same period of time. That impact goes beyond eye fatigue, too: Prolonged exposure to blue light from backlit displays cancause significant stressto your eyes at a faster rate than displays that don’t have backlights.
E-ink displays, on the other hand, don’t require any light to be readable in settings with enough ambient light. The front light is only necessary when there isn’t enough ambient light to make the on-screen text legible, and doesn’t need to be nearly as bright as an OLED or LCD to be readable in the same environment. You can also adjust the levels of blue light on most e-ink devices to change the display’s “warmth.” While that hasn’t been shown to improve eye strain on its own, it does make the screen easier to look at in dimly-lit settings than a straight blue light would be. If you just need a bit of light to see your book while in bed, you can still read everything on the lowest brightness setting to avoid waking up your partner.
Since they use actual ink — each “pixel” has a speck of ink that’s given a negative or positive charge to determine if the ink for that “pixel” is displayed or not — to show everything on the screen, text looks sharper on e-ink displays, too. Even on e-readers without front lights, the ink underneath the screen can be seen and read perfectly fine in well-lit settings while your phone needs a backlight at all times to be useful.
Note, however, that not everything reads better on e-ink devices: Despite advances in color e-ink, photos and colored illustrations, such as those in textbooks and comic books or graphic novels, are more suited to reading on a tablet or laptop.
You’ll get more reading done.
Even if looking at a smartphone weren’t more taxing on the eyes than an e-ink screen, I’d still prefer my e-reader. Unlike my iPhone, it isn’t flooded with notifications and potentially distracting apps like TikTok or YouTube. It’s true that Icouldinstall those apps on an Android-powered e-reader like theBoox Palma, but e-ink isn’t conducive to displaying anything with motion. Those restrictions aside, you can do more with e-readers than just read books. OnKindles, your reading options are limited to e-books and documents sent to your device, but on a Kobo you can also access news articles you’ve saved to the read-it-later servicePocket. The Boox Palma and other Android-powered readers can run any app available on the Google Play Store, so they’re great for text-based content you can’t access on most e-readers; I use it for reading newsletters, longform articles, and occasionally scripts of movies I’m watching. You can do all that reading on a smartphone, but the combo of crisp text and a softer form of illumination make reading on an e-ink screen hard to beat.
The charge lasts longer.
It’s also true that even with the most strict power settings, no smartphone can last for weeks at a time on a single charge; most e-readers devices can because an e-ink display consumes much less energy than an OLED or LCD one. Those screens have to constantly pull from the battery for the screen to stay on and lit. E-ink displays only have to use power when changing what’s on screen, since the ink will stay in place until you interact with the screen.
Do note, though, that because e-ink screens use actual ink, they’re susceptible to ghosting — artifacts from previous pages staying on the screen — one way in which they can make reading more difficult. Most devices, including Kindles and Kobos, allow you to set automatic refresh intervals in which the reader will completely wipe the screen of all ink before loading a new page. The more frequently you refresh the screen, the faster your reader’s battery will die, but its consumption is still nowhere near as much as a smartphone display.
Some e-readers that we like
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