🤖 Oz, Ender's Game & my favorite e-ink devices

How the Boox Palma and Go Color7 revitalized my family's love of fiction.

In the beginning, I loved my Kindle

When I was a teenager, I used to cart an entire duffel bag of books with me whenever I went on vacation. I have a particularly vivid memory of a ski trip with friends in college; one green duffle full of books, and a matching red duffle (borrowed from my parents) full of clothes. I couldn’t imagine going on vacation without books, and for a week away I needed at least twelve. The whole Dresden Files series came with me and I re-read it in the evenings, one or two a night.

I’ve always read fast.

So when the first Kindle came out, in 2007, I bought it as soon as I could. Eventually I tried the Paperwhite, which had a fancier display but no buttons, and then the Oasis, which I loved — it was lighter, with a smaller form factor and crucially… perfectly-placed buttons that worked equally well no matter what hand I was using.

When my Oasis broke, I contacted Amazon, trying to figure out how to repair it, but it was out of warranty. I was pretty sure the problem was a simple hardware problem — the battery, maybe, or something with the button. Customer support told me there weren’t any replacement parts I could buy. None of the phone repair shops I called could help me, either.

Then I discovered Boox e-ink devices

I heard about the Boox thru the Obsidian community, and an e-ink Android device sounded amazing. Not least of which because after trying out the Amazon Fire I’d learned to be very annoyed at locked-down ecosystems that can, for example, have outages that prevent anyone from uploading books to their eink devices. After agonizing over what size device to get, I eventually ended up with the Boox Note3, which I hoped would serve me as well as the Remarkable served all the people in their incessant ads, only better. I deliberately bought one optimized for PDF reading, and it was awesome to handwrite my annotations and have them get converted into text and slurped right up into my notes app, Obsidian. I also really liked how easy it was to slip into my purse with a Bluetooth keyboard and use as a lightweight, low-distraction device for word processing. But the OCR for translating handwritten notes to text files was never as good as I wanted it to be. I ran into some frustrations getting all of my files to sync properly over the slow wifi¹ I tended to use, and with apps not optimized for eink. Although I could get Obsidian — which launched in dark mode — to work with sufficient patience and blind poking, it took work to get my CSS and theme readable on an e-ink device. Most of my other Android apps were a bit janky one way or another.

Eventually I sold my Note3, partly because it was sort of a hassle to process all of my attempts to replace pen and paper (turns out I really like pen and paper), and more importantly I wasn’t reading very many PDFs anymore — I’d replaced Zotero with Readwise Reader for my nonfiction reading. The Note3 was too big to cart around if I didn’t need a full page size display, which it turned out I still sometimes did — so I went out and bought an iPad. It worked fine for the handful of PDFs I was still interested in, but was also handy for watching the occasional movie with my son when he was sick — as far as he knows, we don't own a TV, and I’m content to keep it that way.

Then I got pregnant, and knew I was going to read a lot of books when the baby came, just like I had last time.

I thought about buying another Oasis, but by then it was really expensive — and a normal kindle was pretty cheap, and small enough to fit in my pocket. The price difference felt bigger than it used to be, and I couldn’t quite bring myself to spend hundreds of dollars just for buttons. So I bought the cheap, new flagship 6” Kindle from 2022. I read a few books — but by then I'd gotten used to reading more nonfiction, more articles in the Reader app, and usually reached for my phone. With the Kindle, I only got a few chapters in to The Dawn of Everything. I was pregnant, and tired, and then when I had the baby I read a bunch of trashy romance novels on my phone when I got nap trapped, because with the Kindle I couldn’t always get to the stuff I wanted to read (which often came from a library app). Even in the Kindle app on my Android, buying books was a huge hassle.

I felt bad about my growing tech graveyard

By this point, I really regretted selling my Boox Note3. Readwise had hired me to take point on quality assurance, and kepano took over as Obsidian’s CEO and started pushing to optimize it for eink. The software I used was getting a lot better, and the Boox hardware wasn’t ever really the problem.

By now I’d started to distrust my judgment about buying devices; my life kept changing in ways that had gotten hard to predict. I promised myself I wouldn't buy any more e-readers until I found one that was in color, had page-turn buttons, and cost less than $300. I got lucky, though — for Christmas, my bosses got me a Boox Palma, which solves one of the biggest frustrations with Boox devices — apps actually feel optimized for it, because it’s very, very close to working like a normal phone.

The Palma is incredible². It's got the same form factor as my Pixel 7 — all the little glitches I had with my messenger apps were less of a problem when using a screen size they recognized. I could scroll using the volume buttons — not as ergonomic as the Oasis, but nicely tactile, and crucially that motion didn’t hurt my thumb³ as badly as tapping the screen or worse, painstakingly scrolling. This reduced a lot of the visual jank of “scrolling” on an eink device.

As a bonus, it fits easily in my pocket, and looks really pretty as a “desk ornament” because I've got a nifty widget that displays my highlighted quotes even when the device is asleep. I got one of those little metal stands you can stick to the back of a phone, and it looked very ornamental propped up on the corner of my desk when I wasn’t using it.

All of that was great, but the real game-changer was when I got sick. So sick, in fact, that when I was putting my son to bed and he asked me for our evening book I just did not have the energy to go get one from the shelf. So instead I opened up the kindle app and read part of some scifi coming of age story that seemed like it would be age-appropriate — I’m pretty sure it was one of the Nathan Lowell books I talked about in the chill fiction reviews edition of my newsletter.

After that I decided I wanted to make sure I had something specifically for him handy on my phone.

My go-to source for high quality public domain books is Standard Ebooks — they have high-quality editions of the first three Oz books. Baum wrote over a dozen, which I knew about mostly thanks to Robert Heinlein’s Number of the Beast. I loaded them into Reader, mostly forgot about it, and went back to reading physical books for the most part. I don’t even remember how I ended up reading him The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (maybe he asked me to read while we were in the car?) but once we started reading it, that was it — my son was hooked.

So hooked in fact that I went hoarse from reading so much that day, and my husband insisted I stop reading aloud long enough to rest my voice. But my son really, really wanted to know what happened next, and I didn’t have the heart to deny him, so we compromised and I let Reader’s text to speech read it to him instead. At first, I felt a little guilty, but it’s hard to imagine a book being significantly worse than music, the selection highlights the words as it reads, and it’s not like he’d never held an iPad or seen a movie before.

So he buzzed through the next three Oz books, and basically claimed the Palma as his own. He knows how to turn it on, push play, and push pause, but as far as he’s concerned it doesn’t do much else. For now, for a four-year-old, that’s an advantage. The iPad is, in many ways, too easy to navigate; it’s very easy for my kid to swap between apps because of a stray gesture, or when a notification pops up. The Palma’s slow refresh rate, its limited focus, makes it harder for him to end up confused in a slack thread he doesn’t belong in, or on a game I tested out and decided I didn’t want him playing very often. Plus, it feels like a phone — which makes him genuinely feel like he has a phone to read on just like mommy and daddy do.

My dream device entered the market

Lucky for me, I was able to ‘replace’ it almost immediately, because the Boox Go Color 7 entered the market at only $250. I bought it almost immediately upon hearing its specs; it had buttons, it had color, it was basically the same size and shape as the old Oasis. It sacrificed some of the advantages of the Palma — the home screen isn’t stock Android, for example — but I really missed having a button right under the natural resting place of my thumb, and after seeing the tab mini c (which has support for color and a stylus, and is very handy for my academic friends who like to color-code their highlights), I really wanted to give color e-ink a try.

Friends, I read more fiction books in the 7 days after I bought the Boox Go Color 7 than in the 7 months prior. If that isn’t a ringing endorsement, I don’t know what is. I stopped having to rely on text to speech while I push my daughter’s stroller on our morning walks, because I can hold my device securely in one hand, turn pages, and actually read — even in the most brutal summer sunshine. I can seamlessly switch to laying in my hammock while she sleeps, and read outside while I wait for my babysitter to arrive. I don’t get distracted by notifications, all my books sync perfectly with all of my devices, and since I’m able to use Reader instead of the Kindle app, I have a large language model (known as Ghostreader) at my fingertips to help me.

Ender’s Game made me really appreciate LLMs

In the interests of reading other ‘childhood classics’ that I’d missed myself growing up, I picked up the Ender’s Game series. So far the weirdest part for me is the number of words and phrases I just … didn’t understand. I can’t remember the last time I read a fiction book with so many words I didn't know. How did this book become a classic in the era before instant definitions on e-readers? I’m not just talking about made-up science fiction words — I’m used to stuff like “unobtainium.” Card has an intense vocabulary, and I am the sort of person who damn near aced the verbal part of the SAT. Peripatetic — (adjective): traveling from place to place; itinerant 🧳🚶‍♂️— genuinely stumped me. Even Kindle has dictionary lookup, that’s just one of the built-in advantages of eink over dead tree books. But Reader takes it to the next level.

Ender’s Shadow and Speaker of the Dead had lots of Portuguese, and Ghostreader was helpfully able to translate deeply emotional stuff like this exchange:

"I don't want anything you have to give, either! You're worthless to me, do you hear that? You're the one who's worthless! ⁠⁠Lixo, ruina, estrago-- vai fora d'aqui, não tens direito estar em minha casa!"⁠⁠ You have no right to be in my house.

"Não eres estrago," he whispered, "eres solo fecundo, e vou plantar jardim aí." Then, before she could answer, he closed the door and was gone.

This is a much more effective paragraph if you know what Ender actually said:

"You are not a ruin," he whispered, "you are just fertile, and I will plant a garden there."

The other thing I ran into was that I kept losing track of all the characters. In Reader I have an “internal x-ray” prompt for characters and locations that will have Ghostreader provide context about a given person or place in the context of the specific story, which made it a lot easier to remember that Ouanda Quenhatta Figueira Mucumbi, also known as Ouanda, was:

a young woman with a strong, confident presence and a determined spirit. She plays a crucial role as a xenologist on Lusitania Colony, working closely with the piggies and other scientists. Ouanda is shown to be intelligent, brave, and resourceful, always willing to push boundaries and challenge the status quo. She has a complex relationship with Miro (colleague and potential romantic interest), as they navigate their responsibilities and feelings in the challenging environment of the colony.

On the one hand, this was handy because all that the Ender’s Game wiki had was her status as a xenologist — not enough to jog my memory about which of Novinha’s kids Ouanda was. But more importantly — I didn’t have to fight thru ads, risk the distraction of the world wide web, or wade thru drek in my browser to find out my answers.

I’ve since started reading nonfiction books on my Boox Go Color 7, it’s basically the first time I’ve ever been able to focus on a dense piece of nonfiction that is way over my level — usually I avoid texts about modern politics or economics because I don’t have enough specialized knowledge. But now, instead of getting sucked down rabbit holes when I use a search engine or ask a friend, I can just ask a LLM my question. I run across some famous politician the author expects me to have background knowledge about, get the necessary context, and keep going. Even better, if I suspect the author of bias, I can ask for a quick summary of controversies about a specific figure, or anything else I need to find out to clear my mind… all without losing my place in my book.

So far, having all this built in to my e-reader — with page-turn buttons! with visually legible highlights! — makes the Boox Go Color 7 the biggest gamechanger for me since the original Kindle itself. Five stars.

1. My grammar checker keeps freaking out because I refuse to spell it Wi-Fi — which it claims is the “officially approved term by the Wi-Fi Alliance.” Why LanguageTool thinks the Wi-Fi Alliance gets to be the arbiter of this, I will never understand. I will die on the hill of spelling it ‘wifi’, and here’s why.

2. My husband recently sent me this review of the Moaan InkPalm, which has no microphone but plenty of glare, because it’s cheaper. Since I use the Boox microphone constantly for voice-to-text notes, and roughly half of my dedicated reading time happens in bright sunlight, I am of the opinion that the cheaper price isn’t worth it.

3. I am pretty sure I gave myself a repetitive stress injury scrolling on my phone so much after I stopped teaching 😅