I’ve got a editorial in the March edition of Locus Magazine, “You Do Like Reading Off Screens,” that tries to explain why people who read off screens all day say that they won’t buy ebooks because they “don’t like reading off screens.”
“I don’t like reading off a computer screen” — it’s a cliché of the e-book world. It means “I don’t read novels off of computer screens” (or phones, or PDAs, or dedicated e-book readers), and often as not the person who says it is someone who, in fact, spends every hour that Cthulhu sends reading off a computer screen. It’s like watching someone shovel Mars Bars into his gob while telling you how much he hates chocolate…
The problem, then, isn’t that screens aren’t sharp enough to read novels off of. The problem is that novels aren’t screeny enough to warrant protracted, regular reading on screens.
