In 2011, I posted some thoughts about why I had a dislike for e-readers, and my fears of what they would do to book culture in general, under the name “Go Go Gadget Literature“. Five years later, I sheepishly admitted to having bought a Kindle Fire, which I’d been reading a little on: I’m not positive what prompted the decision, though it was between the library beginning to offer ebooks and my needing to get familiar with the tech, and the fact that a lot of authors were starting to publish on Kindle exclusively. I first installed Kindle for PC on my computer when Niall Doherty, a YouTuber minimalist whose thought-provoking questions I liked, published an ebook exclusive called Disrupting the Rabblement. Well, today I received an email from Amazon congratulating me for having been a Kindle Unlimited member for 5+ years, or more than half KU’s life. Ebooks began growing as part of my reading beginning in the late 2010s and in the last few years has remained a close rival to physical books — sometimes leading, sometimes trailing. I suppose I drifted over through ease of use, but the ever-expanding Kindle Unlimited library and frequent sales also helped.

157 is an absurdly low number given that ebooks have consistently constituted half of my reading in the last few years (over half, in some): I think they’re only counting books I’ve read to 100% on, and it’s not like I’m reading the index. THAT, or they’re only counting books I’ve read on my Kindle Fire itself, and it’s rare that I know where it is. Since acquiring my first smartphone (a Galaxy S7 in 2017), I’ve used it almost exclusively as my e-reader: currently my Pixel 6 is serving in that capacity, but I will say the S7 was a better size for reading. The Pixel is a bit too large to hold in one hand comfortably for long stretches. Of course, I do a lot of Kindle Cloud reading, too.

The first was a library book, the second some solarpunk on Kindle Unlimted I found earlier in the year. I definitely get my money’s worth out of Kindle unlimited, and there’s a reason it constitutes the second-biggest category in my book stats under the “Source” column. This is my current KU shelf. We’re allowed up to 20 titles, but in my experience I tend to have 15 books that have been on there for months, whereas I’m actively looking at 2-3 of them. Some of the odder titles in here: a litrpg novel based on cozy farming games; an analysis of fascism from the Eastern Orthodox perspective; and Titanic with Zombies. (There are three Eastern Orthodox titles in here, I just realized….Dangerous Passions and Philokalia being the others.)

This is quite misleading: easily the largest title I’ve e-read was The Jewish Annotated New Testament, and “The Hillside” was a short story part of the Warmer collection.