Kobo’s Killer App, or: My History with E-reading

I’ve had an on-again, off-again relationship with e-books and e-readers for many years. My first experience dates back to the early 2000’s. Back then, I had an HP iPAQ Pocket PC device, running some version of Windows CE or Mobile, and read books in an application called Microsoft Reader (with ClearType!). (I won’t say “app” because that’s not what we called them back then.) Books were purchased from the now-defunct Fictionwise store, in an also-defunct format with a “.lit” filename extension.

I was stunningly ambitious in what I attempted to read. I remember in particular two trilogies: the epic Neanderthal Parallax by Robert J. Sawyer, and the even more epic Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson. It was as if I was going for a “Big Book, Small Screen” philosophy. These are both trilogies that I have since re-read, having retained very little of my first time with them. From those experiences, I’ve learned that serious reading is best done with a physical dead-tree book. The tactile experience somehow cements the words in my brain. When I think back on my favourite scenes in books, I can often picture the look of the page: the formatting, typeface, the colour of the covers, even how far down the page my eyes would scan to find the passage.

Fast forward a few years, when I picked up my first e-ink device: a Sony Reader. It looks like paper, I thought. My brain will be tricked into thinking it’s a real book.

The Sony’s main innovation was a touch screen (prior e-readers had a D-pad or a button on the side for advancing pages), but they implemented it clumsily, using a touch-sensitive plastic layer on top of the e-ink screen. This made the screen a) not all that sensitive to touch, and b) impossible to read off of at certain angles, because of the glare caused by the semi-translucent touch layer. I ditched the device within a few months, and still count it amongst the worst gadget purchases I’ve ever made.

In the early 2010’s, the Kobo e-reader started showing up front-and-centre at Chapters, my most-visited bookstore (or most visited store of any kind, for that matter). Even though at that point, I was already skeptical of the idea of e-books As A Thing, I bought one because the price was so low.

My main use case since then has been to borrow e-books from the library. It’s a great way to preview books I’m interested in, before buying them. However, the process of borrowing, with its DRM keys and logins and downloads, is just cumbersome enough to mean that my Kobo has spent most of its time on my nightstand beneath a stack of paperbacks.

Sometime last year, I ran a software update for my Kobo. The menus were redesigned, and after my initial “where did all my books go?” reaction, I noticed a new icon sitting there, sort of a little downwards-pointing chevron thing. It looked familiar, and when I saw the name of the app, “Pocket,” the proverbial lightbulb went off.

Pocket is a web application that lets you save content from other websites (think newspaper or magazine articles) for reading offline. Say you’re browsing on your computer and you come across a nice, long article about marbles or artisanal window blinds or something, but you don’t have time to read the whole thing right now. You can click a button in your web browser, and it will save it to your Pocket account. Then, on the phone or tablet app, the text (and maybe some pictures) gets downloaded so that you can read it when the mood strikes, even if you’re offline.

I had tried Pocket before (and its main competitor, Instapaper), but I don’t like reading off computer screens. All it did was let me read off a small computer screen instead of a big one.

Maybe you can see where this is going. Magazine articles can usually be read in 15-30 minutes, which is a good sweet spot for filling the gaps that can pop up during the day. Time that I used to spend aimlessly on my phone, scrolling through Facebook, or playing some addictive puzzle game, I now spend reading and hopefully learning something. The content is free—basically anything that is available online—so there’s no financial anxiety, and there’s no need to set up the DRM stuff that libraries require.

In short, the addition of Pocket to Kobo has made the device into a portable personalized magazine that I carry with me at almost all times.