My Almost Nine Years With Ebooks

Paolo Amoroso’s thoughts on a decade of reading ebooks (via Art Kavanagh, who doesn’t like ebooks) prompted me to do a Twitter search to find out when I’d bought my first Kindle, marking my own move from print reading. The answer: my first Kindle arrived on October 15, 2011. For me, then, I’m coming up on nine years a reader exclusively of ebooks. For me, it wasn’t about eyesight or lighting conditions but initially about convenience. Typically, I am reading one fiction and one nonfiction concurrently and while I’ve more or less come to standardize a habit of the latter at night and the former during the day, I’ve always liked having options depending on my reading mood. Having to carry two books wherever I went always seemed like wasted space and effort, especially if they both were hardcovers. (Not to mention, looking back through the lens of my later autism diagnosis, wasted energy on my part lugging them around.) Once I had that first Kindle, I discovered new reasons supporting the switch: e.g. suddenly I could read on the bus, because any movement of the device still kept the book on a fixed, flat plane; paper books had that curve from edge to spine, and moved move in waves that made me nauseated. Simply put: ebooks meant I could read more often, in more circumstances, and have on hand whatever I was in the mood to read at any given moment. My upgrade to a Paperwhite came on March 9, 2013; for sure, this was all about the illuminated display. Then I upgraded to a newer Paperwhite on August 17, 2015. Most recently, I switched from Kindle to Kobo as of December 20, 2019—partly to start moving away from Amazon and partly because the Clara HD has both blue and orange lights, making reading in bed that much more comfortable on the eyes, and therefore once again increasing my reading opportunities. As I’ve said before, all I need now is for Apple to make a color E Ink ebooks reader and I’d almost certainly switch to that, making all of my devices part of the same, unified ecosystem.