Assessment of the Usability of e-books for Aged and Young Readers

We evaluated the usability of two kinds types of recently commercialized e-books through an analysis of their protocols, compared the time required to read an e-book with that for a paper book, and compared text display sizes that were easy to read for aged and young readers, under identical conditions. This showed clear problems with the usability of e-books for aged and young readers. It was found that it took longer for aged readers to read text in an e-book than for young readers, and that the size of text that aged readers found easy to read was different than for young readers.