📚 Ruminating on eReaders

I named this blog “midnight reading” because I spend a lot of my reading when I should be sleeping. I’ve been like this for most of my life, starting as a kid reading under the covers with a flashlight, graduating to my teen years of hunching over my desk and pretending to study for exams (but in reality, just reading library books), and now as an adult, heavily relying on e-ink readers.

I started with the Kindle Keyboard when it released in 2010. I don’t have a picture of it, and I really wish I did because now in 2025 it is so aesthetics. It had a keyboard, no touch screen, physical buttons on either side to turn pages, and no front light. They sold a cover separately that had a little pull-out light in the corner, and it pulled power from the Kindle itself so you didn’t have a separate thing to charge. It was incredible.

I moved to Japan in 2008 November when eBooks were still a pretty new idea, which meant that any books I wanted to take with me needed to fit inside of my suitcase. Once here, it was understandably quite difficult to find many books in English outside of language learning or super old classics, especially up in Niigata. The first year or so, I was absolutely starved of good reading material. Sure, I could study Japanese and try to read Japanese books, but that seemed like an impossibly far-off goal, especially for someone who was almost completely immersed in English at work.

Then the Kindle Keyboard released in 2010 for around $100, and I snapped it up immediately. I could just buy books on this little device, download it over the WiFi, and read it on the bus to work. I didn’t need to wait weeks for it to ship out to Japan and pay exorbitant shipping fees, and I didn’t need to worry about where to put all these bulky books in my tiny little apartment. Getting into eBooks on my Kindle Keyboard was a revolution for me; it threw the doors open to a whole world of literature that I thought were closed to me as long as I lived in Japan.

Fast forward a few years. It was 2014, Daikon and I had been married a few years, and we’d moved from the northern border of Niigata all the way down to Fujisawa, Kanagawa. I was teaching during the day at junior high schools in Yokohama and catching the trains to Tokyo in the evenings to do Business English. This meant I spent an interminable amount of time crushed against strangers on the packed trains. My Kindle Keyboard was still doing fine, but I was restless and frustrated with my life, and thought I could spend my way to happiness. I made an impulse purchase for the brand new Kindle Voyage.

I felt very guilty about this. The Voyage was an eye-watering $220, made even more expensive due to what was at the time a ridiculous JPY-USD exchange rate. I could afford it, sure, but did I really need a brand new e-reader when my Kindle Keyboard was still doing just fine?

Then the Voyage arrived and I realized oh… yeah… I needed this.

The Voyage was so light, so slim. The screen was beautiful and crisp. I hadn’t realized how much I had been squinting at the Keyboard’s screen until I saw the Voyage. The little indents on either side fit perfectly in my hand, and even though they weren’t physical buttons, it felt natural and perfect to press them and turn the page. I missed the keyboard, but I appreciated that the Voyage made up for it with more screen real estate and a MUCH lighter build. I could very easily hold it in one hand, and even fit into (some of) my pockets. It came with a cover that could fold and prop it up like a stand. It was literally everything I wanted from an e-reader.

I gave my Kindle Keyboard to a friend who, last I heard, still uses it in 2025. Which I guess goes to show you that the Keyboard was no slouch, either. But I digress.

The Kindle Voyage got me through thick and thin. It was my daily companion on trains and buses. I would bring it with me into the office and read on it during my lunch breaks. Technically we lowly temp workers were not allowed to bring in electronics like laptops and phones for security reasons, but my Kindle Voyage was okay. When everyone else got smartphones, I still had a garakei and my Voyage.

Who needs to shell out for water-resistant electronics when you can just recycle a grubby old Ziploc bag for years?

I bought a heavy-duty Ziploc bag, and I would put the Voyage inside of that and then take it with me every time I took a bath. I cannot stress enough to you just how much I love this thing, even now. It is probably my favorite electronic gadget I’ve ever bought, more than any game console or computer.

I couldn't bear to throw out this pink case even though it literally drew blood because it has been with me through thick and thin. おつかれさまです。

The Voyage took quite a beating over the years. This isn’t its original cover; I bought a pink cover to go with it, but the plastic started separating from the magnetic parts inside and I somehow cut my finger on it. The Voyage was discontinued so long ago that there is almost no stock left for replacement covers, and I had to settle for this yellow-green one. The little page-turning indents on the side sometimes glitch out; they won’t register a press, but then suddenly register ten presses in a row.

But the thing that got me to start thinking of buying a new e-reader earlier this year was for a much more annoying reason. Amazon announced that they would soon no longer let you download your eBooks to your computer and manually load them into your Kindle. This naturally led to folks spreading around helpful scripts that would automatically download your entire library before the deadline hit, and I did exactly that. And I decided, well… if any future eBook purchases I make from Amazon can’t be downloaded, I guess that means I shouldn’t buy any more eBooks from Amazon.

I spent the next few months trying to figure out which was the least annoying of the online bookstores. Bookshop.org announced that they would start selling eBooks, but their digital offerings were quite limited compared to their print books, AND they wouldn’t let you download the book files outside of their proprietary app. You can download your book files from Kobo… unless you have a Japanese account. A lot of other shops are either similarly DRM-locked, have a pitifully small lineup, or a combination of the two.

There are always, *ways* of getting digital books without DRM, but it seemed kinda shitty to screw over writers and publishers just to get my hands on reading material. I figured, I have a pretty big TBR pile; I am not so hard up for new books that I would need to start pirating recent releases… yet.

In the meantime, I figured that since I wasn’t planning to ever buy any more Kindle books, I could jailbreak my Kindle and load KOReader on there. Doing that made my Kindle so much faster, I could download books from my computer via calibre over the WiFi, and I just had so many more options and features to play around with. I don’t think anyone strictly needs KOReader, and there are naturally risks that come with jailbreaking your device. But if you have an older eReader that is starting to struggle a bit, it can be quite fun giving it this new coat of paint, so to speak.

KOReader combined with the Voyage is just too powerful. I love it. I wish I had installed this years ago.

And I was doing pretty okay with my Kindle Voyage with KOReader, making decent progress through my TBR pile. But one day, I was reading through r/calibre… and I realized something very important. Remember how I said you couldn’t download book files from Kobo if you had a Japanese account? This is true… but if you downloaded them to a Kobo device, you could then pull them off of there with calibre and de-DRM them.

So I was once again on the verge of another impulse purchase, once more having to do with an e-reader that I didn’t necessarily need. My Voyage was (and is!) still kicking along just fine. I hemmed and hawed over this for a few months.

One night, I was reading my Voyage in bed, same as always. I tried to turn a page by pressing the indent, but as is increasingly becoming the case, it wouldn’t register the page turn. After squeezing the indent several times, finally the device jumped forward two pages. I hit the back indent and it would flip back one page, but then immediately flip forward again to the next page. This happened a dozen times in a row before finally I just swiped at the screen to go back. After I read the page, I squeezed the indent to turn to the next page… only to encounter the exact same problem again. And again. And again. And again. I spent more time that night fighting my Voyage than I did actually reading.

I had gotten used to this glitch. It happened at least once a night, often several times. It was unusual to get it to happen that often in quick succession though, and it was the straw that broke this camel’s back.

The next day, I ordered a Kobo Libra Colour.

And that’s what I’ll talk about in tomorrow’s blog entry, since it is currently midnight and I am very tired. Time to lie down and read something and try to fall asleep…

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