Step two in extricating myself from Amazon was to get rid of a piece of shitware I have hated for years – the Kindle.
That said, I love the idea of a Kindle as a replacement for physical books under certain, limited circumstances:
1) Reading cheap books bought for 99p on the Amazon Daily Deal
2) Travelling and extended periods away from home
But I find the experience of reading on a Kindle to be absolutely miserable. Some of that may have been software decay between factory resets, but honestly I have never enjoyed it. It’s a miserly, thin thing
1) It’s slow as ass to navigate the bloated Kindle interface
2) The interface itself exists to encourage FOMO. ‘Maybe try this book based on books you have read’. Or maybe I’ll read one of the hundreds on here I’ve already bought?
3) The reading experience is sluggish, with it taking a noticeable time per page that just grinds on my nerves.
But more than this, the very accessibility of the technology is its downfall for me. It lacks the tactility of a physical book. It lacks the tangible heft. It lacks the sensory appeal. God help me, I love the smell of books and I will sometimes, mid chapter, just take a big sniff of an especially aromatic page. I like how a book is its own progress counter, the weight shifting as you progress from start to finish. I like the feel of paper pages, how they yield as you turn them to reveal a rich page of promise. I love everything about a physical book. The Kindle has none of these things. All it has is a kind of collapse of a rich sensorial experience into YAFS. Or ‘yet another fucking screen’.
So I got rid of my Kindle. Gave it away. I hope the recipient enjoys it but I’m glad to see it gone.
That’s not to say though I don’t have an eReader any more. I actually upgraded from the Kindle Paperwhite to a Boox Go 7 Color. This isn’t purely an ebook device – it’s a more or less fully featured tablet that uses a colour eInk display. I like it a lot. It’s fast. It’s got features I don’t need to wrestle to access. And it lifts me out of the Amazon ecosystem in a very agreeable way.
Since it’s a ‘proper’ tablet, I can install whatever apps I want on it. So yeah, it’s got the Kindle app. Many of my books are imprisoned there. But it also has Libby (which you can’t install on pretty much any European kindle). It has Storygraph. It has PocketMags. And it has its own best in class MOBI, EPUB and PDF readers. It’s got a nice frontlight, great configurability over the colour and hue, and it even supports a stylus if you want to take notes. For your sins you can watch Youtube on it if you want the weirdly dissonant experience of seeing HD videos in 4096 colours and with a weird ghosted display.
But what it mostly benefits from is some real improvements in the eInk refresh technology. It is, perceptually, almost instant. I mean, if you know what to look for you’ll see it actually selectively updates the display in a way that simply hides the physical lag. But there’s no ‘turn and flicker’ here – it’s responsive in a way that hides all the flaws of the display. Since Amazon is just an app and not the whole infrastructure, it doesn’t feel hectoring. And if you want to read your newspaper on it it’s like having a copy in your hands. The colour display means even things like comics become feasible, although not being a fan of the medium I can’t really say I’ve experimented much with that so far. It will play music. It’ll even run Spotify if you are so included. I even put Tailscale on it and if I want to I can access my home media servers.
It’s perhaps Libby though that’s the real game changer here, since that connects to my local library in Gothenburg and it means that I have access to all the ebooks they make available for borrowers. Remember my dilemma from the last Amazon related update – the need to sustain a book ‘burn rate’ that is logistically and economically unsustainable without Amazon. I said I was going to use the library more, and I will – I even renewed my long lapsed card the other day. But that doesn’t necessarily mean physical books only. Escaping from the Amazon lock-in is pretty great.
I *did* start off by jailbreaking the kindle. Mine is maybe the last generation that makes it feasible. I put KOReader on it, and luxuriated in the fact that I had a completely unlocked device to do… something with. It wasn’t actually clear to me that anything was really any better doing that. I still couldn’t install my own apps. It was certainly a bit faster, and I guess a bit more sovereign, but does it really matter if the real world impact is zero? I don’t think so. A jailbroken Kindle is still a Kindle, still tethered to Amazon’s DRM and storefront unless you already have a comprehensive library of your own books… and reading those on the kindle was never an issue. You just copy them across.
The Boox is different. It’s a philosophy change in the tech stack that does meaningfully deshittify the reading experience. In the Kindle app I am still accosted with consumption-first prompting, but the app is smoother, quicker and even a bit cleaner than the Kindle device itself. It feels more like a light inconvenience than a structural malevolence.
So, to Amazon:
1) I quit Prime. I actually didn’t realise I was still subscribed, but apparently I’ve been paying Amazon.co.uk for Prime for a year. Anyway, it’s gone.
2) There will be no buying anything on Amazon unless it’s a 99p book. I can accept that I buy a licence to read rather than an actual book at that price. Last thing I bought on Amazon was five months ago. My regular no-buy years makes this easy to sustain.
3) I am still grabbing Vine stuff, but only in service of maintaining my membership which is now almost 20 years old. I got invited to the program in July, 2008 [1]. Most of this isn’t even really for me any more. It’s pure review fodder. At this point it’s like a Duolingo learning streak – I just don’t want to break it because the sunk cost fallacy has taken hold.
4) No Kindle. It’s gone. All I have is the Kindle app.
5) I’ve never had Alexa or any smart devices. I don’t like them. I don’t trust them.
6) I can’t quit AWS. That’s not in my control.
Feels pretty good though. Deshittification rating – four stars. Could be four and a half if I quit Kindle books and Vine, but the drawbacks there outweigh the benefits.
[1] :-O