Slow reading

Last month I bought a new e-reader.

I've been following the cycle of new devices over the years, and have been particularly interested in small screens. I have a Kindle Paperwhite—and it's fine. But it's not pocketable, at least not if you count front pockets. It's not available at a moments notice, there to grab whenever I want.

And, ultimately what I'm trying to solve is a way of reducing my phone screen time by replacing it with something that interests me, not just taking it away and forcing myself to do better.

So, with that in mind I started poking around and looking for something that I could carry around with me.

The X4

That led to the Xteink X4. There's other devices out there, such as the Boox Palma; and those look really interesting—but I'm also cheap. I'm not trying to spend a lot of money right now.

So I grabbed the X4 on an impulse, and eagerly awaited its arrival.

It's exactly what I was hoping for—once I tweaked things a bit.

I bought the white version, so that the words feel like they aren't as tight and limited against a black screen. I also immediately set the text to left-align, because justified text looks absolutely rubbish on such a small device.

Also, the firmware that comes with it isn't great (but it's acceptable, you don't necessarily have to change it), so I switched to CrossPoint, basically that allows me to change the software and have a better design to interact with. I also shrunk the font down to the small size, and found it just good enough—it's about the size of text on a paperback.

The interface doesn't have any touch sensitivity. You have to use all the buttons on the side. That's a bit annoying, but it's completely workable. When I want to add a book, I just plug the included micro sd into my laptop, drop books into it, and then plug that sd card back into the X4.

DRM sucks

Now, that comes to reading—and there's some not so great news here.

I've been a Kindle reader for a long time. Because of that I have a lot of books. Thankfully, I got advanced notice that Amazon was putting DRM on all previously purchases, and was able to download my entire library as of last fall. All those books, using Calibre, made it just fine onto the X4.

But I bought a few books since then, and there's no way that I've found to actually read them on any book other than Amazon blessed devices or apps. It's infuriating frankly, an active discouragement toward honest intentions and a desire to purchase and pay for the things I want to read.

But, I digress. There's about three books I've bought recently that I'll just have to finish out on my Kindle, but after that I hope to never buy another Amazon book.¹
For one of the books, in particular (a book that I purchased on Kindle and paperback), I tried to find an alternate source from the publisher—but there is no ebook option available that's DRM free. It feels downright user hostile.

In one case I even contacted an author asking for an ePub version, I'm guessing I won't hear back.

With all that said, a few annoying titles aside, I have a tiny pocketable device that carries my digital library—and I love it.

Article reading

For the past few years I've been reading articles on Reeder. I have about three hundred blogs and news sites I follow, and every day hundreds of posts flow through. It's like a social news feed for me, with the exact authors I want to read—and nothing more. No fancy algorithm (except my own reverse chronological one), and hundreds of interesting ideas I enjoy reading.

But the problem I've faced is how to keep up with it all—especially when these articles require an intentional habit of focus; it's easier to just go to a subreddit or hacker news and directly ingest the latest information. It requires a bit more attention span to care about something more—to read a thousand word article on a specific topic.

I've wanted to change my habits here, and this is where the X4 has really been able to shine.

With the help of Claude, I was able to export all of my bookmarks from Reeder (in a JSON format), convert those to an ePub, and then add them as "books" to my X4.

So, my 700 ish articles, across categories such as politics, religion, and tech, are now essentially turned into newspapers of old on an e-ink device.

And what a joy it is! Over the last month I've been quietly, slowly, read through all the old articles I meant to get to. Claude estimated it was 70 hours worth of reading. I'm about 40% done.

And, in my Reeder app I'm daily scanning for new articles, and bookmarking them.
When I finish my current batch, which will be sometime around June, I'll download the next monthly installment of articles, and read through them.
It's a slower, more deliberate, international way of reading long form writing, and it's now my favorite way to dive into the authors I love.²

I'm now switching between my three "books" (politics, tech, and religion) depending on my mood, and then getting through my first Agatha Christie novel when I'm tired of non-fiction.

This reminds me, just a little bit, of reading newspapers as a kid. And I'm here for it.

1. I do need to caveat that this isn't entirely Amazon's fault. As I understand it they have an option for publishers to make titles without DRM. But it's opt-in, and it doesn't look like many authors or publishers are willing to offer that option.
2. I do wish the screen was higher resolution, I can see those massive pixels. But the X3 appears to have solved that, so that may be a purchase down the line.