Buy A Kindle
(not an affiliate seller)
I don't know what I would do without my Kindle.
Seriously.
It's the best piece of tech I own. For under $100, it's highest ROI product you can buy. If you want to splurge a bit more for a slightly better reading experience, you can buy a Kindle Paperwhite or Scribe, but the Kindle Basic is just fine.
Amazon just dropped their new lineup of Kindles, so this feels like a good time for this post.
I've had a Kindle Paperwhite for 3 years now. It's transformed my life. I read more books than I ever did before, because a Kindle makes reading stupid easy.
Having a Kindle removes all the friction from reading books. It can hold thousands of books, since epub files take up almost no space. Books on Kindle are almost always cheaper than buying the physical copy. The Amazon store is also accessible from the Kindle device, which makes buying books easy and fast. You can also connect your library card to your Amazon account, using an app like Libby, and borrow books from your library to read on Kindle, for free. One other cool feature is the Send-to-Kindle Chrome extension, which allows you to send web articles to your kindle. I do this a lot with things I find on Substack.
Since getting a Kindle, I've read at least 15 books a year for the last 3 years.
This year, I'm on track to read 30. "Number of books read" is a bit of a vanity metric, but I think reading more books than less is always good. Most of my reading has been for free, as I'm a power user of the Libby app. I'll often borrow the max of 7 books at a time from my library, send them all to my Kindle, and pick the best 2-3 that I want to keep reading. The only time I'll ever buy a book is if it's something new that hasn't hit my library yet, or if I really want the physical copy.
The battery life on Kindle is also insane.
E-ink uses little energy, so you can charge a Kindle once and not have to worry about charging it again for at least another 8 weeks. The software is reliable, and I only ever encounter the occasional bug.
The only drawback is if you get satisfaction from holding and reading a physical book--you won't get any of that with the Kindle. But if you're worried about reading on a screen, don't. The e-ink display has a shockingly similar look and feel to a paper page, especially if you've never read on one before.
If it seems like I'm shilling for Amazon and their Kindle products, it's because I am. They're really that great. Go buy one if you want to read more.