Is the simple act of reading a book uncomfortable?

If you were to study the patent archives it would soon be apparent that for hundreds of years a remedy has been sought to the fundamental problem with reading a book. This is of course manifested in the book usually trying to revert to the position in which it was first manufactured ‘the closed position’.

Millions of people take enormous pleasure from reading books, sometimes for hours at a time but suffer from repetitive discomfort in various parts of the body, particularly in the small muscles of the hands causing a dull ache, also in the neck, back and shoulders.

When reminded of such a discomfort nearly all readers declare ‘yes I suffer with that’ and go on to describe how they constantly move the book from two hands, to one hand and then to the other. This is coupled with a changing of body position, for example when lying in bed the rolling from the left side to the right side and so on. Sound familiar?

This problem has always existed and as previously mentioned the patent searches reveal a variety of attempts to remedy it. It shows all kinds of weird and wonderful designs to deal with this simple problem.

Easy read learnt from an engineering point of view that designing such a device threw up quite a number of complexities to create a solution that really did deal with the simple issue at hand. It was of course very simple to deal with part of the problem but once book size, book reading angle, book thickness and others came into the equation the complexities began. Not least the fact that a book may be asked to be able to stand on uneven surfaces such as the bed clothes, beach or garden lawn.