Well, so much for the “scientific method” then. “I recently read nearly every important book, and many of the important papers, on the study of legibility from 1905 to the present….nearly all the good ones say that it is very difficult or nearly impossible to find statistically significant differences in intrinsic legibility between common typefaces read at common sizes and normal distances,” he said in an academic text he published in 2012. These suspicions were confirmed when we stumbled across this quote from notable typeface historian and designer Charles Bigelow: Our initial suspicion was that this might prove to be a difficult topic to research since what determines an ideal reading experience for one person may be very different to another’s. This made us wonder whether there is such a thing as an objectively “better” font for reading an e-book in.

Collectively the team at Edition Guard have lost count of the number of times we selected a new font for our e-book readers, with the most popular justification for doing so being: “I remembered that I could.” However, with the number of options for customization that we have, often comes the temptation to customize simply for the sake of it. In the age of digital content, customization has become so ubiquitous that most of us have forgotten a time where there was only one way to interact with written information: the way the publisher intended.įrom simple tweaks, like setting your browser’s zoom-level, to more granular ones like your e-book reader’s text alignment and font, creating your “ideal” reading experience is just a view clicks or taps away. It’s easy for readers to take the number of choices we take for granted.