If you want it to stick…

You have to write it down! Manually reading and writing is one of the most engaging processes for your mind¹. I’m online almost constantly, and was even home-schooled for half of my educational career: I LOVE typing. I can type at about 122wpm consistently right now², but I don’t remember shit unless I etch it into something. I’d like to touch a little bit on the best devices for both, but first, a little history.

The Birth of Online Bookstores

People often forget how Amazon started! I wasn’t alive to witness the first years of the company’s digital presence ( you can start formulating your own opinions there ) but lucky enough to witness the decrescendo of a once good decent platform. Good ‘ol Jeffrey recognized that one of the easiest Trojan horses into the e-commerce platform was books! For everyone who doesn’t make websites - I wont bog you down with the delightful details of disposable stock keeping units (SKUs), but a big hurdle is organizing products in an accessible, and helpful manner. Some genius exactly 150 years ago³ created a nearly boundless system for categorizing and organizing books by topic and author, the Dewey Decimal System.

In-case you’re too old to remember a scholastic book fair or your 5th grade library tour, the Dewey Decimal System is a 0-900 numbered system for organizing books by discipline on a shelf. If your jam is science? That’s 500. Wanna read about history or geography? Check 900. Entering millions of books became less of a data entry problem, and more of a capital problem - which comes easy when you graduate top of your class from Princeton and go straight into FinTech. Amazon takes off in 1994, with one primary product; Books! For four years, that was their bread and butter, only expanding to other digital media goods in 1998.

Information for All…

Books were available at a never before seen rate! Anyone in the world could search a global marketplace of books across a wide variety of topics, authors, genres, and even languages. Amazon continued to dominate the e-commerce space until they grew to a household name - before dabbling into the hardware market and stumbling upon greatness. In 2007, Amazon launches a revolutionary device, the Kindle!

This thing cured heart-ache right here. When it launched, it sold out within hours and was placed on back-order for a few months. Amazon never expected it to blow up like it did. You could download books over the internet - or included for free⁴, a full featured 3G network powered by Sprint, “Whispernet” allowed you to download books nearly anywhere directly to your kindle. Most notably, included a scroll wheel, and external SD card powered storage. You could purchase and download a book anywhere - or upload your own files⁵ - any .MOBI, .PRC, .TXT, or .PDF. There was also their dark horse, the DRM capable, .AZW format.

The Dark Ages

In a very Sony-core move, Amazon suddenly heard tell that a 60 year old book sold on it’s platform didn’t technically have the rights to sell it. Legally, that’s an oopsie, it might even be financially constituted as an “ouchie.” This happens, as any 60 year old book may bounce between corporate overlord ownership in consequent reprintings - and an automated e-commerce monster can sometimes lose sight of that.

Naturally, the best course of action to resolve a massive breach of legal ownership and digital rights management - Amazon remotely wiped all their copies of 1984⁶ from any Kindle who contained it. If you can believe it, this settled out to a class action lawsuit in the state of Seattle, where a 17-year old student who lost his book for class ( and his notes ), and a second pissed off kindle owner sued Amazon. Amazon lost, and issued a public statement of apology.

A ray of hope…

Thankfully, with the rise of large language models (LLMs), there’s been a lot movements dedicated to techno-minimalism, bare-bones devices that only have what you require. Since Amazon pioneered the e-reader, e-ink displays and paper like screens have exploded in popularity. There are a handful of brands producing high quality e-readers, that allow you to read whatever you desire. Nowadays - Amazon won’t let you upload your own documents without some headache. They must be in proprietary DRM formats - besides… they never really belonged to you anyway.

Next week - we’ll get into my journey modifying my e-reader and notebook of choice, the Kobo Elipsa 2E. An e-reader with a stylus, and some space to be hacked and add my own custom accoutrements ;)

Footnotes

1. According to the latest research
2. Not my record, wanna race?
3. What a fun surprise the day I chose to write all this up.
4. They stopped doing this in 2014, don’t worry.
5. This is also dead.
6. Oh, irony.