As the train pulled in to the station I was waiting at yesterday a strange thing happened: the old man who had been sitting next to me pointed to his book and said “try one of these—they don’t run out of battery.”
He was reading, I have since determined, a library copy of Refuge New Zealand: a nation’s response to refugees & asylum seekers by Ann Beaglehole, which sounds like a worthy tome. Still, a bit impolite.
Perhaps more relevant though: I wasn’t actually reading a book, but one of my RSS feeds. I might have had time that particular morning to physically print out one or two of the articles I was browsing through, but that would have been more than a little bit of a waste. My kindle is also much smaller and lighter than his book would have been, and, well, the battery still isn’t flat as I write this.
Don’t get me wrong: physical books are good and all. But an ereader has its place, and frankly if that place is anyway it’s on trains.
An Unbalanced Centrifuge 