By Barbara L. Fredricksen, St. Petersburg Times
It described my condition as Computer Vision Syndrome (CVS), a phenomenon described by New York City-based optometrist Harvey Moscot as what happens when someone stares at a computer screen for hours at a time. The result is sometimes blurry vision, eyestrain and headaches, Moscot said. Nineteenth-century novelists called it scrivener’s malady, a reference to what happened when clerks spent long, unbroken hours scrunched over account books in dark, windowless offices, staring unblinkingly at columns of figures (think Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener). To my relief, Moscot said the Kindle uses electronic ink (e-ink), which “is easy on the eyes,” but that other electronic devices, like Apple’s iPad and Barnes & Nobel’s NookColor, have a backlit LCD screen, similar to a computer monitor. “A stark contrast between the screen and your surroundings is hard on the eyes,” he said.
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