I picked up one of these insane Kindle Scribe Colorsofts on the recent (and rare) sale – $519 for the 64GB both at Amazon and Best Buy for three days only. My main motivation is reducing eyestrain. I mainly read on airplanes, and intense focus on small and bright LCDs, like when reading, quickly causes strain for me these days. I thought eink might be better and so far it does seem to be!

It’s been a kind of interesting exploration so far. First, I always thought that people who fixated on the “distraction free” value of ereaders were really just mainlining some anti-phone cope, but I have to eat crow on that I think. There IS something I can’t put my finger on to this thing being dedicated just to reading. It even got me to try the Kindle Unlimited trial, something I never bothered with using the app (I’m sure there is evil data science at Amazon that fully predicted this effect). I even ended up doing some “word search” with the stylus, which was as fun as it was idiotic – using like $600 worth of technology to solve a problem that was solved with a $3 paper book and 50 cent pencil before I was born.

The other thing that’s been fun is finding ways to pirate all of my walled garden trapped digital content I’ve collected over the years. Zinio, webtoons, etc. Was cool to dig out all of these DRM removers, finally exfiltrate the content onto my NAS in PDF, then get those PDFs converted clean to EPUB and shipped over to Amazon via the “Send to Kindle” web app.

Anyway, I’ll share more thoughts on this thing if anything comes up. And yes, the pea green Folio Cover was the one on super duper sale – $44! – which is why I got it.