Everything that has to do with the perception might very well be a myth :)
However, in typography and type designer circles it is commonly accepted that Serifs are superior for consuming large quantities of text. Also in layman terms - serifs make the glyphs more distinct and easier to recognize at a glance, in contrast to the sans where there are several glyph pairs that look virtually the same.
Please don't pull a Wikipedia on me here. As an old physicist joke goes -
Experimental physicist comes to a theoretical physicist office,
bring a graph from a recent experiment and asks for a help with
interpreting the results.
- Well, it's all rather obvious. Here's a peak, here's a dip,
because of this, that and third.
- Hold it, hold it... you are looking at it upside down.
- Ah, right, right. *Rotates the graph*. Oh, it's now even more
obvious than before.
In other words, the "actual science" you are referring to frequently ends up to be nothing more than a matter of interpretation and a subject to all sorts of biases. Especially when it concerns something as unquantifiable as "comfort of reading". Just pick up a couple of fiction books, one set in serif and another in sans-serif, go through a pageful of text and see for yourself.
You can't just dismiss science and fact when it's inconvenient. Well, you can, but then your beliefs have no more backing than those of astrologers, and you're guilty of willfully spreading misinformation. You asserted a falsifiable statement as fact ("Sans-serifs are generally harder to read") and in the face of fairly compelling evidence that it is in fact a false statement, you immediately appealed to "common knowledge". It's also "common knowledge" that Einstein failed math as a kid and that eating before swimming will give you cramps, but these are both untrue statements.
Comfort of reading is very quantifiable. You can present text to a bunch of people in serif and sans serif fonts (double-blind and randomized) and ask them to rate how pleasant the text was. You can be clever and ask questions that measure understanding and retention, or you can ask them how much they enjoyed reading the passage, and these will give you indirect measures of reading comfort. Or you can be blunt and ask if they enjoy reading in the font, though this will pick up biases more. Either way is significantly more scientific than an appeal to common knowledge, though.
> Just pick up a couple of fiction books, one set in serif and another in sans-serif, go through a pageful of text and see for yourself.
This isn't science. This is just bias confirmation. ("Wow, I prefer the one I expected to prefer!")
But for the record, my e-reader font is set to Gill Sans.
I have no immediate way of verifying that what you call a compelling evidence referenced in that blog post is in fact compelling and accurate. I could go through all linked sources, but I don't presently have time for that. On the other hand I read several books on typography and I am partial to the type design. From that exposure I do know that the common consensus between people involved in creating said serifs and sans-serifs is that sans-serifs are generally harder to read. So when I am presented with an evidence to the contrary, you can be damn sure I will doubt it.
Throwing around power words like "science" and "compelling evidence" based on a couple of references plucked from a blog post - sorry, but you are well in a meta area, preaching about general subject matter without any regard to the context. You are not the only one who's aware what science and scientific methods entitle, but then you should also be well aware of a bunch of junk that gets published in a format of scientific research, gets quoted and re-quoted and eventually accumulates notable status even though it hasn't even been peer-reviewed once. This happens all the time and it's a part of "science", so being skeptical is a part of the package. And the more obscure the area of the research, the more skepticism is warranted. You surely know that being that well-versed in all things science.
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Your e-reader doesn't have the resolution required for good quality rendering of serif fonts. Hence the Gill Sans.
My complaint is not that you disagree with the blog or that you don't have the time to dig through all the references (neither do I). My complaint is that you've presented something as fact with no evidence and continue to assert its unquestionable truth in the face of contrary evidence. You've made no actual attempt to defend the claim except to say that others agree with you. That isn't knowledge. I'm not even sure it qualifies as an appeal to authority. It's just dogma.
You're right to be skeptical. You're not right to be dismissive.
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My phone also uses sans-serif fonts almost exclusively and I read a ton of stuff on it. It definitely has a high enough resolution (>300ppi) for serif fonts.
I have a suspicion that 90% of the functional effectiveness of any visual aesthetic is learned experience. Witness the outcry over 48fps feature-length films, for example; people complain that it has a "cheap" or "soap-opera" feel, because cheap productions and soap operas are the dominant media filmed in high-speed. This affects the enjoyment that movie-goers take out of their experience, and thus the overall value of the product.
The inferences we make about functional differences in the aesthetics of type would clearly be biased by this phenomenon. It might certainly be possible for controlled observations to reveal that reading speeds are faster for serif type; but this might be due to the fact that the reader is used to it, as most long works are already printed in serif type, in part due to the assumptions of book designers that serif type is faster to read!
