Once More Unto The eReader Breach, Dear Friends, Once More

Back in the summer of 2022, after several years of a Kobo Clara HD as my eReader of choice, I’d made the switch back to a Kindle Paperwhite. I’m not going to bother rehashing the reasons, as you can read about them in a more general post about simplifying and one about this specific decision. There’s basically nothing wrong, per se, with Kindle but once again I’m thinking about making the switch between platforms.

In this case, what happened is that I had a very physical sort of reaction to experimenting with the Kobo again, as I mentioned in my post about wanderlust.

What happened last night as the Kij Johnson book made me restless was that I also was experimenting with returning once again to reading on Kobo instead of Kindle, in part because the much larger Paperwhite feels so much more unwieldy than the smaller Clara HD, which somehow felt more bookishly intimate as I was sitting in bed. I could imagine (well, not literally, because aphantasia) being curled up in a seat in my own little reading world as a bus or a train took me somewhere new, or somewhere old that I couldn’t sufficiently recall because of the SDAM.

It was a very sharp sensation, and in some ways surprising if only because when I’d moved back to Kindle in part it was because I appreciated the more solid built quality of the Paperwhite. I’d only started reading on the Kobo again because I’d been hitting a stretch of Kindle editions that were stuck on ragged right edge so I’d turned to the Kobo for library loans with this problem.

As I noted recently on Mastodon, the Paperwhite obviously isn’t really any clunkier than a trade paperback, while the Kobo is somewhere between a trade and a mass market paperback. I sometimes think that somewhere at the base of consciousness is an entirely quantum and random process that bubbles upward, making me suddenly decide I need something to change. It would explain my eReader issues as much as it would explain why I’m constantly becoming dissatisfied with my homepage or blog designs for no discernible reasons.

At any rate, also on my mind whenever the eReader question arises, whatever the cause, is the question of using Instapaper versus using Pocket.

I’ve been using Instapaper as a sort of linkblogging service, because it has public folders that also come with RSS feeds. For awhile it was powering a sort of “bloglog” as my less cognitively overwhelming answer to maintaining a blogroll, but this meant I’ve been reading articles, blog posts, and newsletters on the iPad despite the sensory strain of reading longform on such a display, because there’s no native support for any kind of read-it-later service on the Kindle. You can send Instapaper articles to your Kindle address, but either as a digest which I find unwieldy or as individual articles that sit amongst your books because there’s no way to filter or group them.

Pocket, of course, continues to have native support built right into the Kobo software, and so switching back to Pocket would mean an easier experience dealing with articles, blog posts, and newsletters. But what would happen with the linkblogging? I’d come across this Pocket update that indicated its newly-released lists feature was slated to add public lists. That would mean I could just move the linkblogging over.

I contacted Pocket to find out where this was on the development track, since that post indicated public lists were coming in 2023. Unfortunately, it’s been back-burnered. Here’s what I was told:

We had really big ambitions for lists when we released them last summer, but a few things happened in quick succession that transitioned us to cautious speed, including user feedback that the feature was confusing to use, and the recognition that bad actors could misuse shared lists unless we had proper content moderation in place.

Our engineering team’s 2024 plans do include lists—but it’s going to be organized around improving the existing experience on web and bringing the feature to mobile. We’re probably not going to be pursuing sharing until our company’s larger content moderation policy is in play.

While disappointing, waiting for content moderation policies and procedures makes a tremendous amount of sense. It never would have occurred to me that such lists could be utilized in bad ways, and credit to Mozilla for realizing that shared or public anything needs to have moderation systems in place.

So, where does this leave me in terms of switching back to Kobo or sticking with Kindle?

For time being, I’m reading on the Kobo. I’ve converted all my unread Kindle editions to Kobo’s format using Calibre and sideloaded them. (One drawback: I don’t think highlights on sideloaded books get saved anywhere that’s persistent.) I’m double-saving items both to Instapaper and to Pocket, which means having to make sure I move links in the former to my Linkblog or Bloglog folders every time I finish an article on Pocket. I’m not in love with the extra steps, because my autistic brain easily can register even small such as task switching.

I’ve made it clear to Pocket that if public lists happen, especially if they come with RSS feeds, there’s a very good chance that I would switch from paying for Instapaper Premium to paying for Pocket Premium if I’m still on Kobo when the time comes. I’ve also made it clear that the chances increase if they bring annotations, highlights, and notes to their software on the Kobo.

Kobo it is, then. Until those quantum fluctuations in the material brain send an errant electron left instead of right, and I find myself right back here all over again.