Craig Mod – scroll down the page to this section – Digital Reading in 2024 – “A long time ago, in a universe far, far away, I used to write about / really care about digital reading. A whole chapter of my life / career pivoted around digital reading and books, what could be, and I travelled the world (?!) talking about this stuff. I lectured at Yale for nine years about this stuff! (“Margins”!!) But I haven’t really talked about reading on a screen in a long time. Mainly because: It’s been boring / depressing. Not much has happened. Patents and monopolies chopped the feet off digital books. Well, I’m happy to report that I think — I THINK — something is once again maybe — just maybe — happening: This little device pictured above — the BOOX Palma (Amazon affiliate link which will make me literally tens of dollars in aggregate) — has transformed my digital reading habits for the better. But before we get into why and how and why now, a little background might be instructive: I love reading. (Perhaps you do, too!) Now, there are many forms of “reading,” and you can spend your whole day doing “reading” and not actually do the kind of reading we love. The kind we love is focused, challenging, sustained, with a pen in hand, making note of new turns of phrase and peculiar, precise words, and feeling our brains get ever-so-slightly reconfigured by the text. The kind of reading we love requires a piece of text be worked over so many times that the author probably never wants to see it again. The kind of text that has been squeezed through a dozen gates of betterness and its darlings have been serial killed and it has benefited from the acute eye of a shrewd editor…Once you hold a Palma, you realize that for most situations it’s an ideal reading container. On the train? In line? In the waiting room at the doctor’s office? I’ve carried my Palma with me every day for the past three or so months with the goal of reaching for it rather than my iPhone. I call it the Gentle Librarian. Soft screen, clean interface, no SIM card and so mostly no internet (it loads up with new articles while at home on Wi-Fi; I can always tether to my phone to update or add something new to read on the go), a refresh rate that is plausible enough on which to watch movies (!! hypnotizing, actually, like watching a magic trick, like what Victorians may have imagined “computer screens” to look like) but not really responsive enough to seduce you into installing social media apps. There’s a lot of friction in this little bugger, and it turns out a bit of friction is a good friend of the kind of reading we love…”