I got an e-Reader!

Never thought this would happen. Aside from not exactly being the reading type (I mean books, of course I read news and documentation), you’d think one could just read on a laptop or phone if paper is not an option. Apparently not.

A week or two back, I had an opportunity to get a e-readers for myself. We had a generous gift card at an electronics store expiring, and with the school year having a lot of reading an e-Reader was a solid choice. Got it practically for free. Turns out, when your device cannot have any distractions by design, it becomes much easier to read. Who would’ve thought. :D

The device

I ended up with a PocketBook era. I’ve done some research, and this one fit my main criteria - not feel like a toy. This is not an important thing for everyone, and it might be wiser to buy something with same functionality but slightly cheaper, but I value build quality immensely. I had an iPad Pro before, and decided that if I were to buy a device that does a fraction of what an iPad is capable of, it should at least feel as good in hands. Among the sea of plastic rose PocketBook era, with its use of metal, usb-C (fine, most modern devices use it) and a good screen. There were some people mentioning low contrast, but I can confirm that is not an issue I noticed.

The reader is easy to hold and use, in fact its small size was quite a surprise. OS is intuitive to navigate and I had no issues uploading books both through a cable and the included send-to-pocketbook feature. There were some issues with PDF files, but it was just them not being as dynamic as ePub when it comes to screen size.

The books

Buying a reader boosted my reading speed. So far, aside from a few small books for school (The lower depths, We), I finished Project Hail Mary, The Martian, and Murder Of Roger Ackroyd, and enjoyed all of them immensely. For me, main benefit of an e-reader over physical books is ability to easily download english-language variants from Russia, as I prefer to read original language if it’s one I know (made it sound like I can speak more than 2 languages). Also, some older books are free without having to buy a physical version, awesome!