Ode to my Ebook Reader
----------------------

Ever since dedicated ebook readers (kindles etc.) arrived they have
been regularly disparaged.  I often hear people emphasizing that they
enjoy reading _real_ books made of dead trees, and only this.  While I
sympathize with this view, I want to use this post contribute a
single, rambling, anecdotal datum to the other side of the argument.

I love books of all kinds.  I grew up reading books about Narnia and
the Matrix; books about Forth, Smalltalk and Logo; books about Science
and Mathematics.  Of course I enjoy not only the reading itself, but
everything associated with it: the smell of books, both new and old,
and the _look_ of beautifully typeset words on a page.

Many of the books I read were borrowed from my local library [1] or,
later, from my university library; but some I bought myself or was
given.  Inevitably this led to me, by the time I left home, to acquire
a sizable collection of books.

When I eventually found my kindred spirit, she was of course also a
book-lover and had a similar collection.  Thus, when it came time to
move countries for the first time back in 2011, a _huge_ chunk of what
we were looking at shipping consisted entirely of books.

It was at this point that I decided to immediately stop acquiring
novels (not textbooks) in paper form and instead buy a dedicated ebook
reader.  Being familiar with the crazy DRM issues and format wars
surrounding ebooks, I chose a reader that used the closest thing to an
open and industry-standard format (epub) and whose DRM mechanism (if
used) was known to be easily breakable.  So I bought a Kobo "touch"
for 120 AUD from a local stationary store, and immediately fell in
love.

First up, my reader is nothing fancy by modern standards.  It's about
the size of the printed portion of a trade paperback novel.  It does
support wifi and can be used to directly purchase (DRMed) items from
the kobo store, but that's about it for the whistles.  Interaction is
via touch sensors on the e-ink display, and there's a single "home"
button at the bottom of the page.  It's not waterproof and there's no
backlight.  It has a slot for a micro-SD card to allow for additional
on-board storage, but I've never used this.

Despite (or because of?) this, it's the perfect thing for reading
novels anywhere besides the bath.  (But seriously who does that?)  The
battery lasts up to a month or so, and is still good after 8 years of
solid use.  The screen has a good contrast and I find the e-ink text
as easy to read as text printed on paper.  And very importantly,
there's nothing else you can do with it besides read books.

Obviously there are at least a couple (!!) of very simple and obvious
user interface differences between physical books and my e-reader:

1. With a physical book I can _feel_ how far through a book I am just
   based on the thickness of the remaining pages in my hands.  The
   substitute for this on my kobo are the percent complete and number
   of pages remaining statistics.  I'm willing to admit the paper
   interface wins here, but I don't miss this too much.

2. With a physical book it's sometimes awkward to read on one of the
   two facing pages, particularly if I'm reading in bed.  The kobo
   absolutely wins here.

A common, and in my view the most valid, complaint against ebooks is
that while you can lend physical books easily, you cannot do this with
ebooks - at least not without lending the reading device itself and
giving away your entire library.  A related complaint is that ebook
readers allow overreaching ebook distributors (*cough* *amazon*
*cough*) to sneak into your house at night and remove books from your
bookshelf.  While I'm willing to concede these points, I believe they
have more to do with the evils of DRM than anything else.  The _first_
thing I do when I buy a book is strip it of its DRM and add it to my
personal book library.  From this point I'm free (from a practical and
ethical rather than legal standpoint) to hand those books to my wife
to read on her device, and nobody can take them away from me - at
least not without _physically_ entering my home.  I should also point
out that there are some authors such as Cory Doctorow who refuse to
allow their work to be DRMed, meaning I don't have to do anything
special for their books.

I'd like to give a special mention to Kobo Inc. here, as I feel that
despite their inclusion of Adobe DRM support in my ereader, they have
make it very easy to "side-load" books bought elsewhere.  This is in
stark contrast to Amazon, where it's their way or the highway.
Furthermore, and again this is a comment specific to this company,
they've continued to provide over-the-air updates to the device OS for
almost a decade.  Not that any of these hugely improve the UI or
anything, but it's always surprising to see these updates appear when
I happen to explicitly turn the wifi on just to check.  (In contrast,
my phone stopped getting updates just over a year into its life.)

Now we come to what I see as the most import advantage of my ebook
reader: it allows me to easily reread books.  My old dead tree library
consisted of many favourites, but with a few exceptions I've never
touched them again after reading them.  In fact, rather than hoarding
these books I should have been giving them away - but the possibility
of reading them again was too alluring, and in Australia books can be
_expensive._ I don't face this problem with ebooks.  The amount of
data required to describe a book is fairly tiny by today's standards.
My reader easily fits my entire library.  And bits don't weigh much.
Thus rereading an old book becomes trivial.  I don't have to pack the
old paperback in my luggage, and I don't have to make a decision
before leaving the house about whether I'm going to read an old book
or a new book.

Anyway, this has all become a lot longer and ramblier than I intended;
congrats (commiserations?) if you made it this far!  I'll just finish
by saying that my ereader was probably one of the best pieces of
consumer tech I've ever purchased.  It does exactly what it says on
the box, and not much more.  It's kept its value incredibly well from
a relative standpoint.  And while I agree with the general consensus
that it doesn't replace the "feel" of a real book, for me it has
definitely improved my enjoyment of books.

---
[1]: gopher://thelambdalab.xyz:70/0/phlog/2019-08-25-Libraries.txt