Or: How I Learned to Love My E-reader

All things held steady, life becomes less surprising as one grows older. We learn what we like, we learn what works, and we settle into a pattern of trying to merge the two in as many ways as we can. However, focused as we are on such merging, we tend to stop experimenting. Why swing away for a home run and run a higher risk of striking out when we know we’re very good at safely looping singles into right field?

However, there are ways to experiment with one’s lifestyle that can work within the acceptable boundaries of even the most risk-averse person. In fact, such low-stakes experimentation might even let you turn one of those singles to right field into an inside-the-park home run (I’m working very hard for these baseball metaphors, so just let me have my fun).

One of the most powerful tools for increasing the likely success of an experiment is a journey map. I use journey maps when teaching design thinking, as they offer a visualisation of how a ‘persona’ (a ‘one-size fits most’ concept of the user being designed for) moves through their life. Not only can pain points and highlights (or opportunities) be easily identified this way, they can only be identified in the context in which they are experienced. Which is to say: understanding where and why a problem is occurring will necessarily inform where a solution must fit. As you are being more targeted in your design efforts, you are more likely to succeed (and more quickly).

One pain point in my own life was that, following the one-two punch of my son being born and shortly thereafter my starting a full-time faculty role at the Uni, I had less and less time for reading. Suffice to say, this was having a deleterious effect on my mental health, to say nothing of my development as an academic.

Naturally, just as time can be lost, it can be created. This is where a journey map comes in. My son and job did not ‘steal’ time away from reading (and other pastimes), they merely changed (and put limits on) how I can engage with and control my allocated 24 hours in each day. In other words, my journey had morphed. Other changes to my journey map, such as the increase in time I spend on a train each day, had accidentally created more time for reading (while raising other existential questions, as I wrote about here). As a result, I was sure that a little imagination could keep the pages turning, as it were.

I started my search for reading time in a logical place: moments, created by the birth of my son, in which there was nothing to do except be with him (and in which he did not need my attention). For example: he went through a phase of taking a very long time to fall asleep. Often, I was just laying in the bed next to him thinking “I could be reading right now”.

My first move was to get one of those little lamps that clip onto your book. This was an immediate failure – the lamp was too interesting to him. Who knew that switching a light on and off could be so much fun? It was certainly more entertaining to him than falling asleep.

The next move was something I had long resisted for reasons as plentiful as they are uninteresting: reading on my phone. As I have written about in the past, I am a prolific practitioner of marginalia and I like to have my hard-copy books as a record of these notes. It pleases me to think that one day my son might read some of my books ‘along with me’, seeing my notations and underlines as he goes (and hopefully adding his own). Also, it’s just nice to have a library and holding a book in my hands is something from which I derive a great amount of pleasure. And yet, books sitting on the shelf unread are merely decoration.

So, I dipped my toes in the waters of reading e-books. Drawing negotiations with myself to a close, I told myself that I’d only read an e-book of which I didn’t mind not having a hard copy. Genre fiction, perhaps, or pop psychology.

Initial results of this experiment were promising, but there were drawbacks. I was indeed getting through the odd ‘extra’ book here and there as my son fell asleep. However, the reading experience was less than ideal. It turns out that reading on a five-inch screen for more than a few minutes is fatiguing, even as staring into a tunnel of blue light was disrupting my ability to fall asleep after I’d stopped reading. I gave up on e-books after a few weeks, coinciding with my son starting to fall asleep faster (thus reducing the time I had to read, anyway).

Life moved on, and I was again reading hard-copy books exclusively. Roughly a year later, though, I was again struggling to ‘find time’ for reading.

Looking at my journey map revealed two main pain points at that time:

1. I still wanted to be reading in bed at night, but this needed to happen in the dark (to induce sleepiness and not disturb my son or The Girl)
2. Reading on my phone inevitably saw me get distracted by literally everything else on my phone (for example: I would read about a city and two seconds later be exploring it on Google Maps). Also: the aforementioned blue light problem.

A solo trip to Melbourne in January afforded me some mental bandwidth to dedicate to these problems. Coincidentally, I was devouring Jason Pargin’s I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom at the time. Being a delightful slice of [very thoughtful and insightful] genre fiction, it was making me hungry for more.

A potential solution to my problem – getting an e-reader – had always been on my radar but I had tried my best to avoid them. Getting another piece of tech to fix what is essentially a tech problem felt irreconcilably bleak – a bit like intentionally hurting yourself to distract yourself from the pain of a different injury elsewhere on your body. Further, I had no interest in financially supporting Amazon by buying a Kindle (the only e-reader that I was aware had a reputation of being at least somewhat decent) and however many e-books through their system.

Thankfully, a bit of light searching revealed an alternative: the Rakuten Kobo line of e-readers. They seemed to have many fans and even a few evangelist supporters, many of whom were, like me, reticent to buy a Kindle. I liked that they’re made from a lot of recycled materials and that they can be repaired – how rare is that these days? But the real clincher was built-in support of Pocket, a read-it-later app that I’ve been saving articles in for more than a decade. I bought a Kobo Clara BW the next day.

After getting the device up and running, I downloaded the high fantasy novel Gardens of the Moon (the first instalment in the Malazan Book of the Fallen series by Steven Erikson) and started to tinker with the device’s settings. Unexpected benefits immediately revealed themselves.

Adjustable font face and size mean tiny print is no longer a problem – the text of every book now matches my preference. Word definitions can be called up instantly and saved to a list for future reference. Marginalia is still in play: text can be highlighted and notated. The device itself is more ‘comfortable’ than holding a hard-copy book, and much easier to make notes in (you ever try to write in a book while standing on a crowded train?). While I knew that the device could hold multiple (indeed, hundreds) of e-books, I didn’t appreciate how nice it would be to just grab the device on the way out of the house and know I’d have a lot of choice (rather than trying to decide which book to take, if I even had the desired one on hand). Oh, and e-books are significantly cheaper, which means the device will pay for itself in the next month or two.

While the Kobo neatly solved my two identified pain points – the night reading experience is much more comfortable, and my phone (with its infinite capacity to distract me) now charges on the other side of the room as I read – it was all of the unanticipated benefits listed above that fully converted me to an e-reader evangelist. How big of a difference has this made to the reading I’m getting done? I have receipts.

I read 87 days in 2024, which added up to 3,430 pages and 12 completed books. As of today, I have read 87 consecutive days in 2025 (and 95 days total), which adds up to 3,200 pages and 8 completed books. At this pace, I will surpass last year’s page total before the end of April, and I will read well over 10,000 pages by the end of the year.

The most remarkable aspect of this drastic shift brings us full circle: I am reading nearly three times as much, but only in pockets of time that were already available to me. I haven’t altered my schedule to squeeze in more reading. Instead, the benefits of the Kobo have allowed me make better use of the free moments that already existed in my schedule. A half hour of reading a book is and always will be vastly superior to using that time for mindless doomscrolling. It’s also spurred new ideas for work projects and has reinvigorated my interest in creative writing (hence: this post).

I do admit to missing hard-copy books, and it does remain my preferred way to read certain things. I can’t imagine, for example, not having hard-copy versions of books written by my favourite authors. I also wouldn’t trade having read a hard-copy of Albert Camus’s The Fall while exploring Paris last year for the conveniences of the Kobo. Reading a hard-copy book remains the most romantic reading experience. But in the three months I’ve had my e-reader, I’ve read many things I would not have read otherwise (indeed, I have moved beyond using it exclusively for genre fiction and now read a fair bit of non-fiction on the device, as well) and I’m better for it. Keeping hard-copy books in my life, then, is merely the next pain point to be addressed. I’ll figure it out.