Kindle Voyager (successor to Paperwhite, apparently) report. Overall goal: Read more, watch tv and goof off on internet less. I’m considering this an investment in my writing career.
So far, so good. I’ve never owned a dedicated e-reader before, and it felt super-indulgent, since I do own a laptop and an iPad mini (a used one that Jed passed onto me, but still). Both of them have Kindle readers that work reasonably well, and I could’ve just gone on with that. But there were a couple of things that I thought might be valuable about having a dedicated e-reader:
a) Less annoying page-turn interface; the Voyager has a light squeeze-button, called PagePress, so you don’t need to swipe or tap — I read fast enough that that has always annoyed me, and this is, as suspected, marginally better. Not as good as turning book pages, but. You can still tap if you’d prefer, and you can adjust both the sensitivity of the press space and the amount of haptic feedback you get on page-pressing. Overall, I like this feature. Wouldn’t be worth upgrading from the Paperwhite for it, though, I suspect.
b) Not taking my laptop or iPad to bed. This is the big one, for multiple reasons:
b1) I suspect the ambr eyewear blue light glasses keep me awake longer than I would normally stay up, and getting eight hours of sleep is a priority for me these days
b2) if I have laptop or iPad in bed at night, I tend to spend a lot more time goofing off on the internet than is in any way useful; the dedicated e-reader only lets me read
b3) when I wake up in the morning, I tend to check e-mail and Facebook from bed, which is just enough movement / sound to disturb Kevin’s sleep
c) using it on transit; I’ll be taking the subway today, for about an hour, and it’ll be nice to have a small handheld device to read on. I think this is small and discreet enough to not be annoying in the way hauling out a laptop would be. (I would use a laptop on Metra, but the social codes are different there, since it’s an actual train…)
I admit, I actually did take my laptop to bed last night; it’s going to take some real effort to break me of that habit. In my defense, I was pretty sick. We’ll see how it goes.