published here: https://www.eleanorkonik.com/p/oz-enders-game-and-my-favorite-e When I was a teenager I used to cart an entire duffel bag of books with me whenever I went on vacation. I have a particularly vivid memory of a ski trip with friends in college; I had one green duffle full of books, and a matching red duffle (borrowed from my parents) full of clothes. I couldn't imagine going on vacation without books, and for a week away I needed at least twelve. I took the whole _Dresden Files_ series with me and re-read it in the evenings, one or two a night. I've always read fast. So when the first Kindle came out, in 2007, I bought it as soon as I could. Eventually I tried the paperwhite, which had a great display, and the oasis, which I loved -- great form factor, perfectly-placed buttons. I gave the old ones to my parents, when they still worked. Kindles are not terribly repairable and the trade-in value wasn't usually much. When my Oasis broke, I contacted Amazon, trying to figure out how to repair it, but it was out of warranty. I was pretty sure the problem was a simple hardware problem -- the battery, maybe, or with the button. There weren't any replacement parts I could buy. None of the phone repair shops I called could help me. I thought about buying another Oasis but by then it was really expensive -- and a normal kindle was pretty cheap, and small enough to fit neatly in my pocket. I got it, but I never really used it -- by then I'd gotten used to reading more nonfiction, more articles in the Reader app, and only got a few chapters in to _The Dawn of Everything_. I had babies, I read a lot on my phone when I got nap trapped, because with the kindle I couldn't always get to the stuff I wanted to read. I heard about Booxes thru the Obsidian community, and an e-ink Android device sounded amazing. I agonized over what size device to get, and eventually ended up with the Boox Note3, which I hoped would serve me as well as the remarkable served all the people in the ads, only better. I deliberately bought one optimized for PDF reading, and it was awesome to handwrite my annotations and have them get converted into text and slurped right up into my notes app, Obsidian. I also really liked how easy it was to slip into my purse with a bluetooth keyboard and use as a lightweight, low-distraction device for word processing, although I ran into some frustrations getting all of my files to sync properly over the slow wifi I tended to use. And although I could get Obsidian to work alright with sufficient patience and blind poking until I could swap out my CSS and theme to get the app readable on an e-ink device, most of my Android apps were a bit janky. Eventually I sold it, partly because it was sort of a hassle to process all of my attempts to use the Note3 to replace pen and paper (turns out I really _like_ pen and paper), and more importantly I wasn't reading very many PDFs anymore. The Note3 was too big to cart around if I didn't need a full page size display. I bought myself an iPad instead, which worked fine for the handful of PDFs I was still interested in, but was also handy for watching the occasional movie with my son when he was sick -- as far as he knows, we don't own a TV, and I'm content to keep it that way. Then I promised myself I wouldn't buy any more e-readers until I found one that was in color, had page-turn buttons, and cost less than $300. I got lucky, though -- for Christmas, my bosses got me a Boox Palma, which solves one of the biggest frustrations with Boox devices. The Palma is incredible. It's got the same form factor as an Android phone, which solved the "janky apps" problem -- all of the little glitches I had with my messenger apps were less of a problem when using a screen size they actually recognized. I could scroll using the volume buttons -- not as ergonomic as the Oasis, but nicely tactile, and crucially that motion didn't hurt my thumb as badly as tapping the screen or worse, painstakingly scrolling. As a bonus, it fits easily in my pocket, and looks really pretty as a "desk ornament" because I've got a nifty widget that displays my highlighted quotes even when the device is asleep. I got one of those little metal stands you can stick to the back of a phone, and it sat on the corner of my desk when I wasn't using it. I started reading Ender's Game for the first time, and so far the weirdest part for me is the vocabulary. I can't remember the last time I wrote a fiction book with so many words I didn't know. How did this become a classic in the era before instant definitions on e-readers? Boox Reader Race Religion War books and Heinlein More reflections on Old Syfy now that I'm trying to decide what books I want to discuss with my kids Wizard of Oz, number of the beast Incredibly helpful. In my morning walks, I used to do text-to-speech but it's not as good, and the e-reader lets me have no glare in the Sun. And for something like Ender's game I really need the translation.