I got mine a month ago, and I’ve read 13 books on it so far. Its chief advantage is its size: the ability to carry it with me all the time and to pull it out whenever I have a free moment is great. (And also, although I have no evidence to support this, I think the smaller format helps me to read better, as I am able to focus on a small block of text rather than letting my eyes wander all over the page, as they are wont to do.) This little device may be the best $60 I’ve ever spent.
I loaded mine with cpr-vCodex. It has some useful features, and it gets updated almost daily. I find the “reading achievements” a bit gimmicky, but it’s otherwise a solid firmware option.
I did, and then I flashed Crossink, and I’m currently using vCodex at the moment, just because I wanted to check out the various options. I’m not sure if I’ll stick with vCodex, since I don’t really care that much about all of the stats, and I liked the interface of Crosspoint/Crossink marginally better.
That is very true, and certainly I’m in agreement that fast, digital reading isn’t necessarily desirable as a mode. Then again, my academic background is in English lit, and I’m a priest, so my professional reading has generally been slow and analog! Reading novels quickly allows me to become immersed in them without allowing my analytical lit-crit brain entirely to take over, and that itself is a nice change of pace, so the e-reader has been a welcome introduction. I do enough wrestling with dense theological texts that I appreciate being able simply to read.
I’m a big proponent of physical books: I have several thousand in my home. But last week, I finally got my first e-reader, the Xteink X4, which I got because it was small and cheap.
In ten days, I’ve read J.-K. Huysmans’s Durtal tetralogy, Nancy Maguire’s An Infinity of Little Hours, Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, and I’ll finish Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest this evening. I don’t think I’ve ever read at this pace with physical books. There’s something about being able to pull out the X4 rather than my phone wherever I am that has really made a difference for me, and the tiny screen allows me to find my place immediately and dive back in. Even when I carry around physical books, I don’t always carry them in places with me, forget them in the car, etc.
This only works for a certain kind of reading—mainly novels. But it has been a remarkable development for me. I don’t think I’m a convert away from physical books, but my wife appreciates that I can now put novels on there rather than trying to find more space in our house for books!
I may be one of the few HN users for whom this is an extremely useful resource. I’m an Anglican priest, so I’m often scanning and pasting bits and pieces of chant into our bulletins. This will, I hope, allow me to create much cleaner looking chant texts in the future! Thank you for sharing it!
Apart from being one of the finest poets in the modern era, Housman was also an excellent textual critic, and he once gave the most amusing and acerbic paper on textual criticism you’ll ever read: https://wsproject.org/method/philology/housman/complete.pdf
Anyone know the little padfolio case that’s featured here? I’d like a better carry solution for my pens and notebooks, and that one looks about perfect for the job.
The tech ban was not just about trying to create better individual learning outcomes or whatever; it was also a matter of respect to one’s colleagues in the class. I was teaching a discussion section of a larger class, so there was a minimal expectation that one would be attentive to what one’s classmates were saying. Allowing students to retreat into their screens effectively undermines the whole project and is, quite frankly, extremely rude to everyone else. That doesn’t strike me as overly “weird.”
If someone was entirely unwilling to be present and engaged or couldn’t go fifty minutes without access to a screen, that student could just be absent from class (with the consequent negative grade impacts).
Over a decade ago now, I was teaching college English as a grad student, and my colleagues and I were always trying to come up with ways to keep kids from texting and/or being online in class.
My strategy was to print out copies of an unassigned shorter poem by an author covered in lecture. Then I’d hand it out at the beginning of class, and we’d spend the whole time walking through a close reading of that poem.
It kept students engaged, since it was a collaborative process of building up an interpretation on the basis of observation, and anyone is capable of noticing patterns and features that can be fed into an interpretation. They all had something to contribute, and they’d help me to notice things I’d never registered before. It was great fun, honestly. (At least for me, but also, I think, for some of them.) I’d also like to think it helped in some small way to cultivate practices of attention, at least for a couple of hours a week.
Unfortunately, you can’t perform the same exercise with a longer work that necessitates reading beforehand, but you can at least break out sections for the same purpose.
My college (Sewanee: The University of the South) is one of the few places in the US with a change ringing tower. It definitely fit the Anglophilic vibe of the place. It was always lovely to hear.
Apparently, I now live in one of the other places where there is a tower (Carmel, IN), but I’ve never heard changes rung on it. It doesn’t appear from the website that it has any local players, which is too bad.
I loaded mine with cpr-vCodex. It has some useful features, and it gets updated almost daily. I find the “reading achievements” a bit gimmicky, but it’s otherwise a solid firmware option.