I've had a kindle Paperwhite for about 3 years. I use it for one thing, which is reading through my massive amount of pirated Discworld/Haruki Murakami books while traveling. All I want it to be able to do is carry a shit ton of books, and allow me to read them for a long time. The e-ink display is very visible and its low energy impact lets me use it for a ton of time. I like it a lot for this specific task. I think the problem that I will always have with Kindles (or any e-reader, for that matter), is that there is no good way for me to share a copy - specifically, my copy - of a well loved book with a friend. Reading is and has always been a largely social activity for me, in that I get more joy out of discussing a book with a friend who has read it than simply reading it on my own. I love sharing an unknown book with a friend, especially if they really enjoy it. E-readers tend to actively discourage that, if not sterilize the process. I like having to explain why my copy of Invisible Cities has bite marks on it, or talking about which short stories I have dog-eared in Palm of the Hand Stories. My copy of Emerson's collected works is at least 50% underlined/highlighted at this point, and I wouldn't want to read it any other way. I think that there is so much about e-readers that is better - on paper, at least. If I viewed reading as a more isolated activity, I think I would like it more.
Invisible Cities was the first book I put on my Kindle Paperwhite. I remember I got the actual device for ludicrously cheap on ebay, and it felt like a magical device that would change my life. I dreamed about the possibility of keeping an entire stash of comfort books on the device. I mainly kept the device in the car, for days parked alongside the Alaskan highway reading in the sun, because I am a person who enjoys possibilities more than experiencing things. There is a line from a story by Camus where a bookshop owner says "History shows, that the more people buy books, the less they read." I don't think I ever read in the car, or even used it for the first year I had it. I had a lot of fun using Calibre and using Google-fu to try to pirate the books I wanted to read- I didn't have a private tracker invite or anything special, and it feels as though the pirate world for epubs and mobis is the least developed and the most treacherous. I'm pretty sure it's because libraries already do a good job of filesharing. Here's when I finally read with it: while in trains, greyhounds, and airplanes. It's the only place where reading is an isolated activity, and the perhaps the only time when I don't feel guilty about enjoying my time. I'm always surprised at how quickly time passes. It just occurred to me that this is probably the part of traveling that I enjoy the most, and I should probably embrace this. That said, I am someone who has trouble reading books, period. I joke to myself that I only read to fuck interesting people, and the longer I think about it the better I get at convincing myself that it's actually true. I am a person who enjoys possibilities more than experiencing things.
That first paragraph is kinda my experience. If you aren't picky you can find a ton of stuff. Classics of course and just odds and ends in volume you can sift through. There's an open directory search Google hack I can't remember the syntax for. Would probably work well to Ok. Issuu is a site I use. Kinda. It's hit or miss. I don't entirety grasp their goal but it's an interesting idea if nothing else from what I've seen. Thank you for reading Tacocat's tips for digital theft. Epub edition.
Every few weeks, I keep re-reading the first 5 pages of 1Q84 (which, as an aside, I have always pronounced as kyew-teen-eighty-four, which seems to be wrong?). I've read the whole book once before, and I want to re-read it, but it's just so much book. The book that I last finished of his was Wild Sheep Chase, and the book that I started reading on my plane ride back here was Kafka on the Shore. In all honestly, I probably won't finish it until the next time I travel.
I never read one queue eight four. I read the wind up bird chronicles years ago and decided that was probably the only really long murikami I needed in my life. I did just finish Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, which was good, but my favorite is still Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.