What produces less eye strain. books or ebooks?

Paliden · Post by **Paliden** » 14 May 2014, 18:52

I think ebooks and the reason why I think this is because you can change the font size and lighting on them and it seems to really help.

LittleWilma · Post by **LittleWilma** » 19 May 2014, 01:48

My eyes fair better with e-books because I can adjust the font size.

Alexsandra · Post by **Alexsandra** » 19 May 2014, 02:53

I don't think there is much difference when it comes to eye strain outside of the fact that you can change the size of your lettering with your e/reader where you can't with a book.

castor · Post by **castor** » 19 May 2014, 06:59

i haven't noticed any difference. But, as many of you mentioned, adjusting the font size is a feature that helps a lot.

Wolfsbane Creations · Post by **Wolfsbane Creations** » 26 May 2014, 09:22

Paper Books

SidnayC · Post by **SidnayC** » 12 Jul 2014, 01:26

I think actual books! ebooks with all the technology used to read them is bad for your eyes.

raindropwriter · Post by **raindropwriter** » 12 Jul 2014, 11:08

I have an e ink reader (not back lit) so its same as a paper book. So, both produce same eye strain after a continuous long reading for me.

salberson 10 · Post by **salberson 10** » 12 Jul 2014, 13:02

Paper books but ebooks are more convenient

CrescentMoon · Post by **CrescentMoon** » 12 Jul 2014, 19:45

Even though I read ebooks all the time, ebooks cause more eye strain for me than paper books. I think it has something to do with the brightness of the screen and the glare maybe. But sometimes I need to take a break from reading an ebook and so I read paper books and it makes my eyes feel better.

Qew · Post by **Qew** » 13 Jul 2014, 00:13

Found the answer to this exact question. Sort of. I mean really it's these kinds of seemingly innocuous questions that can end up revealing a lot of strange confusing things about reality, and research is nowhere near finished on this topic.

Jeong H. (2010) has this delightful review in his background section:

"Cushman (1986) found that visual fatigue is signiﬁcantly higher when reading texts on a screen than on paper. In the current stage of technological development, the display of text on computer screens has been found to have a negative impact on surface legibility (Dillon, 1994). Texts and documents on screen have a lower surface legibility than printed documents. Macedo-Rouet et al. (2003) noted that students felt much more tired when reading on screen; this may be because of the display contrast and resolution of an e-book. Kang et al. (2009) conducted an experiment to measure students’ eye fatigue and found that reading a p-book caused less eye fatigue than reading an e-book. In their study, the authors concluded that the eye fatigue from an e-book was due mainly to the low display contrast and resolution of the on-screen text."

The actual experiment determined visual acuity via a CFF test (I think it's just at what frequency does a blinking light look continuous; this was found to scale linearly with visual acuity, which isn't eye strain at all but... oh I know, it's the thing they measure with 20/20). They found after reading a book it was reduced by 1.63 Hz; after ebooks it was reduced by 3.04Hz average.

So yeah, ebooks statistically cause more eye strain than books.

I'll include the references from the citations at the end if anyone wants to follow them up.

As for why you get eye strain, I actually found that JUST the eye strain (Asthenopia) from looking at a screen is due to "Binocular/Refractive Vision Accomodation" Blehm, C. (2005). I can't post pictures because that violates the "no URLs" rule, so I'll explain as best as I can without diagrams.

Ok so your eye has a lens in front of the actual ball part of the eyeball. The lens takes beams of light from a point in space and refocuses them at the retina. Clearly, this focal point in space has to change to focus on objects closer or further from you. This is done via cilliary muscles that line the lens. Counterintuitively, the muscles relax when you look at something far away and contract when you look at something close up (ok so it's counterintuitive when you actually look at an eyeball but honestly just look it up yourselves). So Blehm, C. (2005) say that this 'accomodation' for long periods of time is what causes eye strain. It is in fact just looking at things up close.

So it is the case for paper books as well!

The paper also says that this effect does not cause any statistical effect on vision impairment that naturally occurs in old age (visual acuity loss). There is a bit of nearsightedness but it only occurs immediately after using a screen for a long time, so they call it "Transient Myopia".

Similarly, other symptoms present that aren't eye strain.

I think the most important, or at least the least trivial one, seems to be blink rate. according to Acosta M. (1998) " during performance of a computer task, the basal blink rate of about 12 blinks min− found in normal young subjects decreased by about half." Which is bad because "Dry spots of the precorneal tear ﬁlm begin to appear 15–30 s after a blink (Doane, 1980) while corneal temperature drops at a rate of 0±033°C/s when the eyes are open (Efron et al., 1989)."

And honestly I haven't been able to find out why at all. I can try a bit later but I think I need a break from the screen now. Going to go look at some trees. Far away trees.

References in order of citation:

1. Jeong H. (2010) "A comparison of the inﬂuence of electronic books and paper books on reading comprehension, eye fatigue, and perception" Electronic Library, The, Vol. 30 Iss: 3, pp.390 - 408
2. Cushman, W.H. (1986), “Reading from microﬁche, a VDT, and the printed page: subjective
fatigue and performance”, Human Factors, Vol. 28 No. 1, pp. 63-73.
3. Dillon, A. (1994), "Designing Usable Electronic Text: Ergonomics Aspects of Human Information Usage", Taylor & Francis, London.
4. Macedo-Rouet, M., Rouet, J.-F., Epstein, I. and Fayard, P. (2003), “Effects of online reading on popular science comprehension”, Science Communication, Vol. 25 No. 2, pp. 99-128.
5. Kang, Y., Wang, M.J. and Lin, R. (2009), “Usability evaluation of e-books”,Displays, Vol. 30 No. 2, pp. 49-52.
6. Blehm, C., Visnu, S., Khattak, A., Mitra, S., Yee, R. (2005) "Computer Vision Syndrome: A Review". Survey of Ophthalmology 50(3).
7. Acosta M., GALLAR J., BELMONTE C., (1999) "The Influence of Eye Solutions on Blinking and Ocular Comfort at Rest and During Work at Video Display Terminals", Experimental Eye Research , Volume 68, Issue 6, Pages 663-669, ISSN 0014-4835,
8. Doane, M. G. (1980). "Interactions of eyelids and tears in corneal wetting and the dynamics of the normal human eyeblink". Am. J. Ophthalmol. 89, 507–16.
9. Efron, N., Young, G. and Brennan, N. A. (1989). "Ocular surface temperature". Curr. Eye Res. 8, 901–6.

Hannaa_Campbell · Post by **Hannaa_Campbell** » 13 Jul 2014, 14:23

Books. Ebooks tend to hurt my eyes more because of the light.

thankyou · Post by **thankyou** » 21 Jul 2014, 05:02

For me it's physical books. If there's good lighting in the room, then I can read a physical book for hours with no problem at all.

Titanoboa92 · Post by **Titanoboa92** » 21 Jul 2014, 17:52

I like real books better, my eyes hurt after staring at a screen for a long time.

ghostpixie · Post by **ghostpixie** » 23 Jul 2014, 21:32

I think e-books create the least amount of strain, but that's just my personal opinion. Science can probably prove me wrong!

mandap24 · Post by **mandap24** » 23 Jul 2014, 21:38

I think both e-books and regular books can both produce an equal amount of eye strain in their different ways.
I prefer to read regular books I'm sure i'd love the e-books for font size changing when I'm older.