Originally Posted by Hellmark
If it really shined away from your eyes you wouldn't see it at all. The only real difference between edgelit and backlit is the light is less intense for edgelit because of the size of the light source and the need to travel through fewer layers. Angle has nothing to do with it. The light still gets bent and reflected to an angle that is direct to the eye.
Angle has everything to do with it, and that simply isn't how light works; by your logic, you wouldn't be able to see things illuminated by a torch that's facing away from you. Light is a beam of energy. That beam hits whatever it's facing, and then is refracted away from that thing at a different angle. That much weaker refraction is what enables us to see where it's pointing. This is how light works - you can learn more about this here
. So the screen of an e-ink reader catches the brunt of the light,and we only see the very weak refraction produced by the screen not absorbing all of the light - thus, eye fatigue is greatly reduced because we're seeing a "secondary" light ray and we're seeing it at a "lesser" angle.