Plateau Kindle Before Peak Kindle

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From Medium:

My wife thinks I’m insane. For a number of reasons, I suspect. But for the purposes of this post, I mean because of my gadget travel habits. You see, everywhere I go, I bring a MacBook, an iPad, and a Kindle. That’s on top of an iPhone, of course.

. . . .

I love my Kindle because it’s what I read every night before I fall asleep. And I know that if I don’t travel with it, I’ll get back into the bad habit of reading my phone (or tablet).³ Obviously, I check those before I go to bed, but I do try to set aside time to read without interruption before I sleep. It’s nice to read without distraction (and without as much backlight).

Couldn’t I just turn off the notifications on other devices? Sure. But I’m weak. When I read, my mind tends to wander. And on the iPad post-iOS 9, swiping left to bring up your Twitter feed is the new mind wandering. I will stray.

On the Kindle, I cannot. Yes, it has a web browser. But there’s a reason that feature has been labeled as “Experimental” since its inception. It’s terrible.

. . . .

But a quote by Dave Limp, Amazon’s head of hardware . . . seems to hold a key:

One thing about the Kindle itself won’t change, though: It’s not going to become anything more than a reading device. Amazon’s heard from so many customers over the years that they love their Kindle precisely for all the things it doesn’t do.It’s a respite from Facebook and news alerts, push notifications and emails. “The more that we’re distracted, the more valuable solitude becomes,” says Dave Limp, Amazon’s head of hardware. “The last thing I want is being absorbed into an author’s story, and get an uplevel notification for Angry Birds.” Reading is about focus, about falling out of your life and into a story, and so the Kindle is about those things too.

Link to the rest at Medium

PG doesn’t know if he will die before his Kindle Paperwhite does, but, if the Kindle goes first, he will instantly order another.

9 thoughts on “Plateau Kindle Before Peak Kindle”

  1. I’m not sure if I’m going to wait until they die (the Kindles that is – I suspect that their life expectancy may exceed mine). As time passes mine seem to run out of memory and processing power. It was the latter that retired the my keyboard Kindle (when adding/removing from collections I could press the page turn button 30 times before anything happened, though admittedly it then turned 30 pages all in one go, which did add a kind of fast navigation process.)

    Our original Paperwhites topped out at 1200 books so my wife is now using two, one for fantasy and science fiction and one for the rest. My later generation Paperwhite recently had to have all the history books moved to a spare one before I could install the latest software update and has a page turn delay in “add to collection”.

    I’m now thinking of going for 32 GB Oasis on the theory that this can hold a lot more books than I can conceivably read in my lifetime, though maybe not more than I can conceivably buy; it’s possible I have an e-book addiction.

    • With my Voyage, at least, storage space isn’t an issue because I periodically go through and remove books I don’t envision reading again in the near future from the device, secure in the knowledge that the files can be re-downloaded from the cloud in seconds if I change my mind. 🙂

      • This is of course the sensible approach – though it wouldn’t work on my old keyboard Kindle – but I’m too worried about the possibility that I’ll want to check on a book whilst out of reach of Wi-Fi (paranoia maybe but our internet was recently down for several days), plus I find it hard to identify books I can’t envision re-reading in the near future; then there are the mass of books I’ve yet to read and which I fear will be forgotten if they are left on the cloud.

        None of which means you are not being much more sensible than me.

          • Calibre and external hard drives.
            Including one at an offsite location.

            I paid good money for all those books I’m never going to live long enough to read and that collection is going to outlive me for sure.

            The readers, sadly not.
            My three oldest eink readers have already died: one via aircraft accident, one via “stroke”, and the third one’s eink screen is fading around the edges at age nine.
            My FIRE HD tablet still works as good as ever but the USB connector won’t grip charging cables too firmly anymore. One of these days it’ll starve on me.

            Not quite as durable as my ATARI computers, still running after 30 plus years… 😉

            • Totally agree regarding Calibre and offsite storage.

              So much so that I’ve just completed a project to “download and transfer via USB” over 2000 books – save that I didn’t do the transfer, just saved the files – giving me up to date files for everything in a format that Calibre (with apprentice Alf’s help) can read. I realised that I had far too many titles with only KFX versions of the files and it was easier to download everything rather than try to sort out which ones I needed to download.

              Mind you, none of this stops me wanting everything to be on the Kindles/tablets I take on holiday as I’m still worried about being stuck up the Irrawaddy with no working wi-fi.

  2. “…more books than I can conceivably read in my lifetime, though maybe not more than I can conceivably buy…”

    Happy to discover I’m not the only one. 🙂

    Dan

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