Acres of blog space is devoted to the best book reading experience. Is it the Kindle, the Kindle Fire, the iPad or, even, the iPhone? As you know, I’m an avid iPhone Kindler, but I also indulge myself with the real estate of my iMac’s 27in monitor. Reading a book from a distance, as you would view a movie or, perhaps more appropriately, a web page, is a strange experience at first.
Fortunately the Kindle app for Mac does a good job of making the text eminently legible. Depending on the size of your screen, the Kindle app will display either two or three columns. You can choose just one column but that is surely only for masochists. Two columns suffices on the 11in Air or the iPad in landscape mode, but the 27in iMac demands three columns or the lines are too long to read comfortably.
Personally, I spend many an hour in front of the screen reading books (such as Claire Tomalin’s superb new Charles Dickens: A Life, seen here). I don’t find it a strain at all. I’m equally happy reading from any of my many backlit devices. Only the e-ink Kindle reader gets left out most of the time and I have concluded that my personal preference is for a backlit screen. Perhaps I spend too much time in the gloaming instead of in bright sunlight, but that’s my peronal view, against all received wisdom, and I’m sticking with it.
