HOWTO... Send web pages to your ebook reader
What you need: Kindle or Kobo ebook reader Time required: 60 minutes
There are only so many hours in a day, and you don’t want to spend them all sitting in front of a computer. Besides, there are times when you should actively avoid backlit displays like the screen on your laptop, as the blue undertones disrupt the human circadian rhythm.
This is in large part because of the way we’ve evolved. Primitive humans didn’t have alarm clocks or curtains, so they rose with the sun, when the light is cooler and has a bluish hint. Moreover, after a yellowy, orange sunset, the evening was spent staring into the amber embers of a fire.
Over millennia, and many generations, human brains adapted so that cool light was associated with being more alert and warm light – amber, red and so on – with calming down and getting ready for sleep. That’s why daylight-simulation lamps are blue, while evening filters for operating systems give your screen a slightly sepia hue.
As good as these filters are, it’s still worth avoiding using an LCD screen late in the day. But what if you want to catch up with the news by reading interesting web articles in bed at night? The solution is to switch from LCD, which shines a light directly towards your face, to e-ink.
Older e-ink displays, like those built into Amazon’s original Kindle devices, relied on being lit by an external light source – just like the page of a regular book. However, e-ink devices with their own illumination use a clever system whereby a small number of LCDS sit at the top or bottom of the screen and shine light directly on to it, rather than towards you. What’s known as a guide layer then spreads that light across the whole surface of the screen to illuminate its contents. This allows you to read late at night more comfortably.
You can take advantage of this technological shift by sending web pages to your ebook reader, so you can catch up in comfort, whatever the time of day. E-ink devices are also more comfortable to read in bright sunlight, so they’re a far better companion than your tablet or phone, even if you’re heading to the garden or beach.