Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com

In the thread post by Alan on mobileread, the medium large size, 36pt, was fitting about 10 words (5 lines ~10 characters/2 words per line) on the screen. So you weren’t even seeing a full sentence on the screen, and to get to the next part of the sentence you would have a 1-3 sec delay while the screen refreshed. That much of a delay that often would bug the heck out of me.

As much as I like the eInk devices, I would think that the better responsiveness rates and size of LCD screens would make them more suitable to reading at large font sizes.

Does anybody here have experience with this that they would like to share?

Using 72pts per inch, the Kindle’s maximum font size is about 18pt, the Cybook’s is about 24pt and the iLiad’s is about 30pt. The above MobileRead thread links to screenshots (bitmaps) of the Kindle and iLiad largest sizes and to photos of the Cybook largest size font. The default (non-adjustable) line spacing on all three devices is much too large for large fonts.

Note that is is not a font issue, all the devices use scalable fonts. FBReader on the iLiad can use larger font sizes, but it also has automatic hyphenation and fine control over line spacing (both of which may be essential at really large font sizes).