I completely disagree. I used to read novels on my Palm Pilot with its 3" screen. Its lower resolution also meant that I had to use a bigger font. Your eyes don't scan more than about 3-5 words simultaneously, so a screen width any wider than that is suboptimal.

The only problem with small screens is that you have to page more often. You can work around that by using autoscroll or using an app that lets you page easily (for instance, by using the volume buttons). If you're stuck using swipe to page, that would get annoying very quickly...

I didn't say it's impossible. I said it's not a great size. You could read a novel one word at a time on a digital wristwatch, too, but it'd be a pretty subpar experience.

> Your eyes don't scan more than about 3-5 words simultaneously, so a screen width any wider than that is suboptimal.

The fact that your eyes can't consume 20 words at once does not mean that a line length of 5 is optimal. Your brain gets context from the surrounding words. If 5 words in a line is optimal for giving context to the center word, it's decidedly suboptimal for the other words in the line, which necessarily have less surrounding context. Your eyes also don't really read more than one line at a time. Does that make it optimal to limit the display to one line?

Also, autoscroll sucks. It's not natural to read at a fixed pace. As your level of wakefulness, concentration, interest, etc. changes, so does your reading pace. Beyond that, some lines simply take more or less time to read than others.

I've read books, papers, articles, and various other things on ipads, kindles, palm IIIs, two android phones, and a Transformer prime, (I think I'm being exhaustive enough). And I completely agree with you. I tore through lots of books on my old palm III, but it was often constraining and some types of material worked much better than others.

As a more recent example. In a book club I'm in, we were reading "The Theory of the Leisure Class" (man, oh man is Veblen cantankerous, but "conspicuous consumption" is a bit of genius). Anyway, many of us passed around the ebook copy we had, and at least five people tried to read it on their phones... to unanimous, vehement agreement that the late 1800's style of long-winded rhetoric was too much for reading on small screens. Headaches, lots of paging back to find the point of things again, no one made it through more than a quarter of the book that way. Just another example of the medium shaping the possible messages.

> If 5 words in a line is optimal for giving context to the center word, it's decidedly suboptimal for the other words in the line, which necessarily have less surrounding context.

Because the lines are so short, when you're reading the word at the end of the line your eyes have already picked up the context from the beginning of the next line down.

I've read hundreds of novels on small screen devices over the last 12 years. So maybe it requires a little bit of adaptation. But with this adaptation I much prefer the size of softcover books and phones over hardcover books and 6" e-readers, let alone 10" iPads.

> Because the lines are so short, when you're reading the word at the end of the line your eyes have already picked up the context from the beginning of the next line down.

Your brain can't handle more than 5 words of context, but it can buffer up multiple lines? If you've got some evidence for this, I'd be interested, but it seems like you're just making things up at this point.

> I've read hundreds of novels on small screen devices over the last 12 years. So maybe it requires a little bit of adaptation.

It requires adaptation because it's less comfortable. Saying the iPhone is a more comfortable form factor than a small tablet/ereader is like saying that this is a more comfortable dictionary: http://dictionaryperson.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/lilliput....

> But with this adaptation I much prefer the size of softcover books and phones over hardcover books and 6" e-readers, let alone 10" iPads.

A 6" ereader already has a smaller page than about 99% of softcover books. You can't lump together phones and softcover books based on size unless you're talking about those Lilliputian dictionaries. Seriously, pick up a Nook at your local B&N and hold it up next to nearly any paperback on the shelf. Even most mass-market paperbacks have larger pages, and trade paperbacks positively dwarf the Nook. You'd need two Nook screens to equal the size of a page in a Harry Potter trade paperback.