Ebook Vs Book

"But we’re not convinced – the e-book edition of Legacy of Ashes is an awful lot easier to read in bed than the hardback, and e-books don’t squash your thumb all night if you do doze off."

At least if I roll onto my paper book at night, I just get some bruises, rather than spending the next morning at A+E getting bits of glass and plastic pulled out of me, eh?

I dare say the warranty doesn't cover "was having a wonderful dream of killing all humans, and put my elbow through the screen" either. Although it'd be an interesting claim to make.

eBook Readers in bed - I wouldn't.

Steven R

again?

How many pointless "iPad" stories, reports, studies have to filter through the outlets? Is this what Apple have resorted to as marketing? It's pathetic lame and speaks volumes about the pointless product.

I speak as an Apple user, but not a church subscriber. I will criticise them all day! The fanboi nonsense blows. I love my Windows computers too. *gasp*

Next we'll have a story of a 99 year old woman that can for the first time be online because of the iPad and it'll be on YouTube. But it'll be a non-story really because she'll have someone sitting next to her tellingher what to do. No... wait. :)

Not to mention...

...that iPads have wipe-clean screens... ahem.

What? No Kleenex icon??

Re E-ink screens don’t offer the same contrast

They will later this year.

www.trustedreviews.com/peripherals/news/2010/04/26/E-Ink-Demos-Next-Generation-eBook-Reader-Displays/p1

Another missive from the Dept of the Blindingly Obvious

So this is basically saying that sleeping with the lights on makes it harder to get a good nights sleep? Can we expect a follow-up story that shockingly reveals that random loud noises have also been discovered to disrupt sleep?

Catch 22

Melatonin, if I remember my secondary school crash course in biology (no, I mean the national curriculum one, not the back of the bikesheds one), is produced when it's dark, and inhibited when its light - much as the article suggests.

My problem is that e-books and real books will only allow melatonin to be produced if you're reading them in the dark. I normally have the light on to read those, so presumably melatonin output is minimised, much like when reading from an iPad, or indeed any other brand of backlit screen.

Light is one thing...

I don't want to go to sleep with anything that will emit radiation during the whole night... Keeping an ipad under the pillow surely must be a bad idea: 6+ hours of constant radiation from a few cm away.

iMsick of these iStories

This is another report on yet more lame, make-work "research" that either goes to great lengths confirming self-evident facts or goes to equally great lengths confirming something utterly frivolous or somehow otherwise without merit.

But hey, let's be generous for a moment and assume this really is a scientific discovery. iPads have a regular LCD screen like a gazillion other portable computing devices. Which people often use in the dark. In bed. Before sleeping. So why no research highlighting why Asus or Acer netbooks can screw up your sleep? Why no alarm at the prospect of company supplied Dell laptops doing the same? There are a hell of a lot more of these devices out there turning countless poor schmucks into insomniacs than there are iToys.

Oh, wait...

Unless, of course...

...one turns the brightness down.

Bollocks

If you want to read an e-ink device in bed, you have to have a light on, because it's not backlit. And once you've tried the crappy cover-mounted reading lights, and realised that they're useless because of reflection, that means you have to have a pretty bright night-stand light on at the very least. A backlit device on a low-to-moderate setting is positively soothing by comparison.

Am I qualified to argue with a professor specialising in sleep disorders? Well, as usual we can't see the actual research to see what was actually published, only a clueless LA Times journo's interpretation of a dumbed-down press release. So we have no idea what the original research behind this story actually said, but I'm willing to bet that it diverges somewhat from the LA Times reporter's take on it.

Face it ...

... reading a book electronically is a crap experience. I have a number of electronic books and they remain unread and unused. The paper versions of them however are constantly being perused.

"Don't try to sleep with your iPad, doctor warns"

...because you'll burn your willy?

Jeez, and people complain about battery life...

...if you're going to sleep, switch it off/into hibernate/standby/whatever.

Misleading title

....hands up all those that thought this article was about Apple fanbois trying to f*** their latest gadget?

Time for a SAD app!

There you go Register, you've just inspired me to create a SAD App to help sufferers with this illness.

OK, basically it's a plain white screen. But I'll charge a fortune for it!

There is probably something to this...

Circadian light is a personal interest. Some random Googling produced the fact that the iPad has a screen brightness of a bit over 300 nit. That is getting up into the range where some sort of effect might be detected. The problem is that figuring out how much light is too much is a bit complicated. The easy fix for the iPad (as for any other light producing screen) is to turn down the brightness. Since the iPad has an ambient light sensor it isn't really any extra work to do this.

The circadian light thing has all the attributes required to become the next magic rock. My somewhat cynical thoughts are listed here:

http://59.ca/weblog/ledlight/clight.html

Just one place of refuge from tech please!

Been a tech geek since I was 8, some 31 years now, I don't like having tech gadgets in the bedroom. The one place you need to wind down and switch off. Can't we just leave the gadgets outside eh? I am not into all this Fung-Soya cobblers, but it's hard enough to keep the EMFs at bay, let alone sleeping with the buggers next to your head!

Only a handful of electric gadgets should be in the bedroom, the clock, the lamps and ahem, other battery powered "devices", but laptops and their ilk? No thanks!