Small E-Ink Reader That Changed My Reading Habit

Matthew Bogart

A while back I read The Last Quiet Thing, a fantastic piece by Terry Godier, a piece about a twelve-dollar Casio watch compared to an Apple Watch, and why one of them is a product and the other is a relationship. I've been thinking about it ever since, keeping my eye out for single-use devices that just get out of the way.

That's how I ended up with an Xteink X4 in my pocket.

It's a tiny pocketable e-reader, smaller than a cell phone, with an E-Ink screen and no agenda beyond displaying books. No notifications, app store, or social feed. Hell, no internet access. It reads DRM-free EPUB files, the open ebook format for books that aren't locked inside places like Amazon's shitty ecosystem. It's $69, there's a 20% off code running right now (xteink20%).

I already had a small collection of EPUBs kicking around. Cory Doctorow sells all his books as DRM-free files at craphound.com, and I'd grabbed a Humble Bundle of his work years ago. There's also Standard Ebooks, a volunteer-run project that takes public domain books and produces beautifully formatted editions. Their Winnie the Pooh and David Copperfield are genuinely lovely objects. You can just drag files to it like a usb drive, but I've loved using a free app called Calibre which not only can transfer files wirelessly but kind of makes it fun to work with my ebook collection in the same way that iTunes made it fun to play with my music files back in the day.

But here's what I actually want to tell you about.

I keep this reader in my pocket on top of my phone. So when I reach in, the habitual, almost involuntary reach that happens while waiting for the bus, or on the toilet, or while waiting on someone for a moment, my hand lands on the Xteink first. I pull it out. I read four screens of a book instead of four little screens of social media.

I've read more in the last month than I have in the last year. Now, that's not an impressive amount. My girlfriend is a librarian and she reads constantly, and I am nowhere near her pace. But that's not really the point. The point is that something that used to feel like effort now just... happens. The device gets out of the way, and it's so nice to have something in my life that helps me enjoy wonderful things, instead of just trying to be the middle man between me and them.

It seems just like what Godier was writing about.