On this blog of mine, I chose a black theme because blackness on an electronic display is better for the eye than the brighter colours because black is the absence of light. It enables you to read longer when reading from an electronic device.
White paper is best for the printed books as paper does not emit light rays but only reflects light rays, and it usually does not reflect the amount of light ray that is bad for the eye. It is a good writing material as every little mark on it can be distinctly visible. However reading a book with a bright background, as most books have, under a noon-day sun is bad for the eye as the book now reflects too much light than is good for the eye. Therefore, reading from it has little or no negative effect on the eye when not reading under the noon-day sun or any other super emitter of light.
However electronic books with white background will have a negative effect on the eye even when one reduces the brightness of the display unit. So I believe it is better if the colour pattern on an electronic book should be the inverse of that of a printed book, that is, black background and white text. This is so that the rate of the emission of light will be minimal and its effect on the eye will be minimal as well. That is why I like Evince Document viewer as it enables you to invert the colours of a pdf book. In doing this, one will be able to read a pdf book clearly seeing what is written yet having such a minimal effect on the eye. This means one could read a pdf book for long and have no eye ache. In the rise of what is called Ebook, such way of reading articles, books, or any publication in Ebook format will be safer, and perhaps it could be a complete replacement for printed books. Just perhaps.
Ebook publications, I believe, are a very welcome method of publication. It is far more economical than publications in their hard copy. Infact all that is needed to release an Ebook publication are time, mental and physical effort, and medium of making the publications available. Such mediums are all over the net, for example, sourceforge, 4shared, etc. So Ebook publications are far more economical than printed publications.
For this reason, I would like to encourage people to get used to Ebooks but never at the expense of a healthy eye. I by choosing this black theme throw my weight behind the healthy usage of Ebooks. That answers “why the blackness.”
