I’m a relatively new owner of an Amazon Kindle. I’m not the only one. Since bricks-and-mortar shop PC World started stocking the Kindle, growing numbers of Irish people are carrying them about. Amazon don’t disclose sales figures, but they have announced that they sell more digital books than paper copies.

Many people who ask about it simply say they don’t see the point. In my experience over the last month or so, it’s a fantastic device which is not only contributing to a rediscovery of reading for pleasure, but helping me consume digital-only content in a whole new way.

Digitally portable, beautifully readable

I was always a bit of an excessive reader.

Then I bought a smartphone.

Suddenly, I had a near-infinite supply of always-available reading material. Sure, there was a small enough screen, but that was a small sacrifice for the sheer flexibility. I started occasionally forgetting to slip a book into my bag when leaving for work. Then I stopped altogether.

What I didn’t realise, of course, was that I was simply enamoured with my new and shiny gadget. It was sexy, but it wasn’t a good replacement for the pretty good technology of a bound paper book.

The Kindle is.

Describing the screen is a little like describing a colour the reader hasn’t seen before: it needs to be experienced. When I first opened my neat little package from Amazon, I reached to remove the cellophane sticker telling me to charge it, and continued to search for its edge for about 90 seconds before realising that there was no printed sticker. I was looking at the screen.

The end result is that I carry an enormous library of content with me everywhere. If I get bored of what I’m reading, I move to another topic. This has worked wonders for getting me reading quality work again. I’m browsing through Ha-Joon Chang’s Bad Samaritans one minute, then moving to a classic Arthur C. Clarke science fiction novel.

That’s not even the best part.

Enjoying digital content

One of the main reasons I took the plunge to buy the device was this blog post from British journalist Dave Lee on why the Kindle is his favourite gadget. The bit that really intrigued me was this:

Nobody reads anything online. We think we do, but really we read the first few bits of text, skim around, check out the hot pictures (if it’s the Daily Mail…) and move along to something else. That’s not reading.

I love the Kindle for reading websites. Its built-in web browser is absolutely awful, with slow screen refresh and painful navigation. Luckily, thanks to Instapaper, I don’t need it.

Instapaper and products like it clip the text from long web articles and save them for later reading: and they can send it wirelessly to other devices. This is where I’m getting the most value from. Using sites like the incredible Longform.org or LongReads.com to find examples of wonderful extended features and beaming them to the paper-like screen means my appreciation for digital content has skyrocketed. Long web articles are no longer a chore, but a pleasure.

I’ve been reading about the search for MIA soldiers at the bottom of the ocean, the Pulitzer Prize-winning story of cutting-edge DNA research being used to save a child’s life and a first-hand account of the crippling highs and lows of chronic insomnia; none of which I would have bothered reading on a monitor.

If you’re waiting to take the plunge, do. You won’t regret it.

Posted by Dave Molloy in •Tech

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