I have owned many physical books in my life. There was a sense of pride looking at the bookshelf and everything lined up in a colourful row of spines and order. Now the only books on our shelf in the loungeroom are Terry Pratchett Discworld hardcovers, and the obligatory The Lord of the Rings that was my 21st birthday present.
Never did I think I’d become such a fan of eBooks as I am today. The convenience (weight, portability) and price makes reading eBooks the perfect solution for the way I live. My reading levels increased from say 2008 onwards, but once I had my first eReader my level increased to steadily to a regular level of around 20,000 pages a year. If you were to give me a physical book today, I’d buy the eBook and read that instead.
My jump in pages read once I began using an eReader
My first draft of this post listed an iPad 2. as my first eReader, and in the sense of reading multiple novels it was. As I trawled through my memory I recalled reading Sun Tzu’s The Art of War on either my Palm Pilot, or a later Pocket PC. Back then the eBook ecosystem wasn’t what it is today. Think Project Gutenberg and you’ll know what I mean.
My first eReader was an iPad 2 and even then it wasn’t a dedicated device. The year was 2011 and my memory fails me so I can’t remember if it was The Dark Tower, or A Song of Ice and Fire that I began reading first. My iBooks account shows I had purchased both. I enjoyed the experience but after some time realised my left wrist was sore from holding the device as I read. I knew Dad had an early Kindle and I borrowed that to see what the experience was like.
The Kindle was much easier on my wrist and a new reading experience. Like iBooks the 4th generation Kindle allowed me to change fonts, line spacing and justification all to meet my needs. And the books? They were cheap to buy and download direct to the device.
I’ve owned three Kindles and the first Kindle I bought in my own right was an 8th generation Kindle Paperwhite. This would have been around 2016/17. I call it the Toyota Corolla of the eReader world. Mid-priced, rock-solid and does exactly what it needs to do. It was my workhorse for many years and I was making heavy use of the Kindle sync function across devices, easily switching between the Paperwhite and the Kindle app on my phone.
One day I noticed a small crack in the screen. I suspect the it had flexed in my bag. A grey lead pencil, carefully applied, took the shine off the crack and very quickly my brain stopped seeing it.
I began using Calibre to remove DRM from book so I always had a copy for the future. That’s not possible anymore.
Amazon's market strategy
As much as Amazon makes buying books easier, they have increasingly tightened the screws on their platform to create reader and author lock in. I describe it like this.
“We will gladly sell you this book. But, you can only wear our spectacles to read it. You can’t read it anywhere else, nor can you loan it to your friends. Oh, and should we decided we don’t want you to read that book any longer (or we want to change it’s contents), too bad.”
Eventually I began wanting to take more and more notes on the books I was reading and the Paperwhite’s keyboard entry was too slow so I looked to upgrade.
I upgraded to a Kindle Oasis 10th generation in 2021 for the speed. At twice the price of the Paperwhite it had to perform. And perform it did. Much faster for page changes and on-screen keyboard entry, and the buttons on the side made one-handed reading easy.
Last year, again in the middle of a push to get better notes, I replaced my Kindle Oasis with a Kindle Scribe with handwriting capability. I looked at all the alternatives (Remarkable, etc.) and eventually made my decision on, “it still needs to be a good eReader” (see New toy, new learnings).
Technically I have no issues with the Kindle Scribe at all. Operationally it’s a nightmare. The already user-obnoxious Kindle menu system has been extended in yet another direction making switching between eReading and eNoteTaking a 10 second process each time. That put me off using it everyday as a notebook. Inline note-taking when reading a book was easier. In both cases, getting notes off the device involved an email to myself. The Scribe is also big! Almost the size of the iPad 2 and that’s not conducive to reading everywhere.
The Scribe made reading a chore. As I write, I’ve downsized and am 48 hours into using my Kobo Libra Colour. It’s got the smaller size of the Paperwhite (6” screen) and the speed of the Oasis. I spent a lot of time reading over the weekend (once I finally got calibre-web syncing to work) and enjoyed every minute of it.