Musings of a Marketing Maven

When I shared my first impres­sions of a new Kin­dle Touch, my review was pos­i­tive but not glow­ing. Now that I’ve used it quite a bit over the past week, my opin­ion about its read­abil­ity has improved. Thanks to evo­lu­tion­ary advances in its dis­play tech­nol­ogy, this Kin­dle is much bet­ter for read­ing than last year’s Kin­dle DX model, which gave me eye strain.

On the Kin­dle Touch char­ac­ters are black and crisp, con­trast is bet­ter. There’s also an option that gives you some con­trol over line spac­ing and char­ac­ter spac­ing. If you care about the “rivers of white space,” this allows you to min­i­mize that effect — which makes for bet­ter readability.

It does not ren­der sub­tle typo­graphic effects very well; grey-scale graph­ics are also some­what com­pro­mised. That said, it’s very use­ful for dis­play­ing text-dense nov­els and sim­i­lar read­ing material.

Thanks to its improved dis­play, I can com­fort­ably read the Kin­dle for at least an hour with­out eye strain. (I had to return a Kin­dle DX last year because it gave me eye strain headaches after 20 min­utes of use.)

It’s delight­ful to know that I can safely tuck the Kin­dle Touch into a purse or knap­sack, for use while on-the-go, or when wait­ing for some­one to show up for a meeting.

I do hope that pub­lish­ers will soon take advan­tage of the new EPUB® 3 stan­dards, for more vari­a­tion in the typog­ra­phy and page lay­out of e-books. Oth­er­wise there’s a bore­dom fac­tor that you have to over­look when read­ing books on a Kindle.

In the mean­time for straight­for­ward books, the Kin­dle Touch is the best e-book reader for immer­sive read­ing, when you’re will­ing to dive into a book for an hour or more.

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