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 an electronic reader for myself. We had a generous gift card at an electronics store expiring, and with the school year having a lot of assigned reading ahead an e-reader was a natural 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 feeling 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 the hands. In 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. The operating system is intuitive to navigate and I had no issues uploading books both through a cable and using the included send-to-pocketbook feature. There were some issues with PDF files, but it was just them not being as dynamic as EPUBs when it comes to screen sizes.

The books

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

And the rest are free if you know where to look.