What You Actually Read, Written Down

Building the record before the table

Before any comparison of screens or brands, this chapter walks through what actually belongs in a personal reading record: the shapes your reading takes (reflowable novels versus fixed-layout PDFs, comics, textbooks, handwritten notes, audio), where that reading comes from (store, library, personal files, required apps), the conditions you read in (light, hand position, distance from your eyes), and the specific complaints you have right now, written as complaints rather than wishes.

To make the checks concrete, it works through a real scanned PDF pattern file — testing whether the text resizes, whether a text layer exists (it doesn't, so no search, reflow, or text-to-speech is possible on any device), how wide a diagram spans the page, and how a personal library is stored. Three invented readers — a library-borrowing novel reader, an engineering-paper reader with hundreds of local PDFs, and a notetaker who needs handwriting to leave the device as something searchable — show how different these records can look, and how a finished record might point away from an e-reader entirely, toward a tablet, a notebook device, or just different phone settings. The chapter closes by pointing to the filters at ocdevel.com/ereaders as something to read, not yet decide from.

Changes worth noting

A handful of firmware updates shifted what current owners can actually do. Kindle firmware in the 5.19.2–5.19.6 range closes the trick of keeping a device offline to hold onto an expired library loan, now forcing a reconnection check before the book reopens — a change reported on Reddit's Kindle discussion of the 5.19.6 update, on BGR's coverage of the airplane-mode Libby workaround being killed, and on Pocket-lint's account of the Libby access change, with a rundown of the firmware itself at Goodereader's report on the airplane-mode fix. On Kobo, firmware 4.4.6 repairs on-device store checkout that had broken over certificate requirements and adds backend support for syncing reading with StoryGraph, covered in Goodereader's report on the new Kobo software update and noted with some skepticism in a firmware roundup that seemingly does nothing, with version details trackable at a running log of Kobo firmware versions.

An e-reader is a small slab of plastic and glass that holds books. Most of them use a screen made of electronic paper, which is why they look grey and matte instead of bright and glowing. They cost somewhere between the price of a nice dinner and the price of a laptop. They compete with three other things you probably already own: a phone, a tablet, and a shelf of paper books. Against paper, they win on space and on the ability to buy a book at midnight. Against a phone, they win on the eyes and on not being interrupted. Against a tablet, they win on battery life and lose on almost everything else.

That is the category. Now here is the thing I am not going to do in this chapter: I am not going to tell you which one to buy. I am not going to name a brand, a screen size, a price, or a pick. Not one.

There is a comparison table at ocdevel dot com slash ereaders. It has scores. It ranks devices out of a hundred. It has picks. At the end of this course you will be able to read that table, argue with it, and choose from it. But a table with twenty-odd columns is only useful once you know which two or three of those columns your own reading makes decisive. Right now you do not know that. Neither do I, about you. So the table would just be a list of numbers with a winner at the top, and you would take the winner, and there is a real chance the winner would be wrong for you.

So this chapter does one job. You are going to write down what you actually read. Not what you wish you read. Not what you read in college. What is on your phone and your laptop and in your bag this week. That written record is the thing every later decision gets measured against. Without it, "is this screen good enough" has no answer. With it, the question becomes "is this screen good enough for a two-page chemistry diagram at arm's length," and that question can be tested.

Let me teach the record first, then we will build one together from real files.

There are four groups of things to write down. What you read. Where it comes from. When and where you read it. And what is hard about how you read right now.

Start with what you read, because this is where most people's shopping goes wrong. You need to separate your reading into kinds, and the kinds are not genres. They are shapes.

A novel is reflowable. That means the text is not stuck to a page. If you make the letters bigger, the words rearrange themselves and the page count goes up. Nothing breaks.

A fixed-layout document is the opposite. A PDF of a journal article has a page that cannot move. The text sits where it sits. Make it bigger and the page does not reflow, it just gets bigger than the screen, and now you are sliding around a window looking at a corner of a paragraph.

Comics are fixed layout too, but with an extra demand: the picture is the content, so shrinking it to fit is not a compromise you can accept the way you can with a paragraph.

Textbooks are usually fixed layout plus navigation. You do not read a textbook front to back. You jump to page 214, then to the index, then back.

Handwritten notes are not reading at all. They are writing, and they only count as a need if the notes have to end up somewhere else afterwards.

Audio is a fourth thing again. An audiobook needs a speaker or a headphone connection and an app that can play it, and none of that has anything to do with how the screen looks.

Write down which of those you actually do, and roughly how much of your reading time each one takes. If ninety percent of your reading is novels, that is enormously useful information. It means most of the expensive columns in that table are irrelevant to you.

Second group: where your reading comes from. Write down the store you buy from, if you buy. Write down whether you borrow from a public library, and which one. Write down roughly how many books you have already paid for, and in which account, because those books are the reason switching brands is not free. Write down whether you have personal files — documents on a computer, papers you downloaded, things a colleague emailed you. And write down any app that is genuinely required. Not nice to have. Required, as in, if this device cannot run it, I have lost access to something I need.

Third group: when and where you read. This is the group people skip and then regret. Write down the light. Do you read in bed with the lamp off? On a sunny patio? On a train at dusk? Write down your hands. Do you read one-handed, lying down, thumb on the edge of the device? Or two-handed at a desk? Write down indoors or outdoors. And write down the distance from your eyes to the page. Hold a book the way you actually hold it and look: is it thirty centimetres away, or is it resting on your chest at fifteen, or propped on a desk at fifty? That distance decides how big the letters need to be, which decides how much page is left over for words, which decides whether a small screen is pleasant or maddening.

Fourth group: what is hard right now. And here is the rule for this group. Write the complaint, not the wish. "My phone screen is too bright at night and I read until two in the morning" is a complaint. "I want a device with a warm front light" is a wish, and it has smuggled in an answer before you asked the question. "I have four hundred PDFs on my laptop and I never read them because reading them on the laptop is miserable" is a complaint. "I need a ten-inch tablet" is a wish. Keep the wishes out. You will get to solutions later, and you will get to better ones if you did not decide in advance.

Now let us actually do it, because a record you have only heard described is not a record.

Before you start, gather two things. Find three or four documents you genuinely read — not representative-looking ones, actual ones. Pull them from your downloads folder, your email attachments, your existing reading app. And if you have a store account or a library card, have it open. Those files and that account are the only starting information you need. Everything else in the record comes out of them or out of watching yourself read.

I will run the checks on one file so you can see the shape of it. My example file is a scanned PDF of a knitting pattern, twelve pages, downloaded from a pattern shop. Everything I say about it is true of that file and only that file.

First check: can the text get bigger without the page turning to soup? Open the file in whatever you normally read it in. Increase the font size or the zoom. On a reflowable file, the lines rewrap and you get more pages. On my knitting pattern, there is no font control at all — only zoom. Zooming to a hundred and fifty percent pushes the right-hand column off the edge of the window. So: fixed layout. That is a testable claim I can write down, and it tells me something specific. It tells me that for this document, screen size and the device's ability to crop or split a page matter more than anything about fonts.

Second check: is there a real text layer, or is it a photograph of a page? Try to select a word with your cursor. Then use the search function and search for a word you can plainly see on screen. On my pattern, the cursor draws a box instead of highlighting a word, and searching for "cast" finds nothing, even though the word "cast" is right there in line one. That means there is no text layer. It is an image of a page. This matters more than it sounds like. No text layer means no search, no text reflow, and no text-to-speech, no matter how clever the device is. If I had found selectable, searchable text, I would have written "has a text layer" and known that reflow and search were at least possible to test later. I got the other answer, and the honest version of that line is: this file cannot be searched or reflowed by any device, because the limitation is in the file.

I should correct something before I go further. I said earlier that a fixed-layout page cannot move. That is loose. A fixed-layout page with a real text layer can sometimes be reflowed by software, badly, by stripping the layout out. What cannot move is the layout itself. My pattern has no text layer at all, so nothing can be stripped out and nothing can be reflowed. Two different problems, and the check tells them apart.

Third check: how big is the page, and what spans it? Look at the document properties, or just look at the page. Mine is A4, which is about twenty-one centimetres across, and the stitch chart runs the full width of the page — a grid about eighteen centimetres wide with symbols in the squares. That is the measurement that matters, not the page size in the abstract. An eighteen-centimetre grid on a screen narrower than eighteen centimetres means either shrinking it or scrolling across it, and shrinking a grid of small symbols until it fits is exactly how you lose your place in row forty-two.

Fourth check: how big is the whole library, and where does it live? Look at the folder and read the size. Then look at your store account and count. Mine: about sixty pattern PDFs in one folder, roughly two hundred megabytes, all of them on my laptop and none in any account. Compare that with somebody whose entire library is four hundred novels inside one store account and nothing on a computer at all. Those are opposite situations. Mine needs a way to get files from a laptop onto a device. Theirs needs a device that can log into that account. Neither is harder in general; they are just different questions.

So what did those four checks buy me? A short record, and it looks like this. What I read: mostly fixed-layout PDFs with full-width diagrams, plus novels. Where it comes from: sixty local files, no store account. And a list of things I now know I have to test on any device rather than assume — whether it can display an eighteen-centimetre-wide chart legibly, whether it can accept files from a laptop, and whether it can crop or split a page, since search and reflow are off the table for these particular files.

Notice what that list is. It is not a list of features I want. It is a list of tests. That is the whole trick. Every line in the record turns into either a test or a filter.

Notice too what stays uncertain. The checks tell me the file's limits. They tell me nothing yet about whether any device handles that file well, and they do not tell me that all my sixty PDFs are scans — I checked one. If the other fifty-nine turn out to have text layers, my record changes. So the honest record says "at least some of these are scans, spot-check three more."

Now let me introduce three readers I will carry through the rest of the course. Nadia, Owen and Beatrix. They are made up. They are illustrative examples, not descriptions of you, and if none of them sounds like you, that is expected and fine. Their job is to make the differences between records visible.

Nadia reads novels, almost only novels, about eighty a year. Where they come from: her public library, borrowed through a lending app, plus a handful she has bought. Almost nothing on a computer. When and where: in bed, lights off, her partner asleep beside her, held in one hand because the other arm is under the pillow. Also on a beach in summer. What is hard: her phone is too bright and too tempting, and holding a hardback one-handed in the dark does not work.

Owen reads engineering papers and two textbooks. Where they come from: a university library portal and a folder on his laptop with about eight hundred PDFs in it. He has no consumer store account at all. When and where: at a desk, daylight, two hands free, screen about forty-five centimetres away. What is hard: half his documents have figures that span the full page width, and he constantly needs to jump from page ninety back to a table on page twelve and then to a reference list at the end. On a laptop he can do that; the laptop just eats his afternoon and his eyes.

Beatrix reads a little and writes a lot. Meeting notes, diagrams, marginal notes on contracts. Where it comes from: documents emailed to her, and blank pages. When and where: in meetings, on her knee, indoor office light. What is hard: she writes on paper and then the notes are trapped on paper. Somebody asks for the notes and she photographs them, badly. What she needs is for handwriting to arrive on her laptop in a form she can send.

Look at those three records side by side and something becomes clear. They are not three points on one scale from cheap to expensive. They are three different machines. And it is entirely possible that finishing your own record leads you somewhere other than an e-reader. Beatrix's record barely mentions books. What her record describes is a digital notebook. Owen's record describes a document reader, and a big one. Some records describe an accessible reading setup — very large text, spoken text — and the right answer there might be a phone with the right settings rather than a new purchase at all. A general-purpose tablet is not the default answer and neither is the most capable device on the table. The most capable device on the table is heavier, more expensive, and worse at the one thing Nadia does every single night.

So what happens next, with these records in hand? Questions. Specific, answerable, open questions.

From Beatrix's record: what form do her handwritten notes come out in, and where do they go? Can they leave the device as something her laptop can open? Does that require an account, or a subscription, or a companion app? Is the export a picture of her handwriting or something searchable? Those are not answered yet. They are the questions her record forces.

From Owen's record: how does a device show a page whose layout cannot move? Can it crop the margins, split a page into halves, or reflow the text where there is a text layer to reflow? How do you jump to page twelve and back without paging through eighty screens? And how do eight hundred files get from his laptop onto the thing?

From Nadia's record: can this device borrow from her library directly, and does that depend on her country and her particular library? What does its light do at the dark end, and can it be made warm as well as dim? Can she turn a page with the hand that is holding it?

None of those has an answer in this chapter. They are the shape of the answers to come. And they can only be asked precisely once you understand what an electronic paper screen physically does, which is a different conversation.

One thing you can do today: go to ocdevel dot com slash ereaders and just look at the filters. Do not choose anything. Do not look at the scores. Read the names of the criteria and notice which ones you now have an opinion about because of your record, and which ones mean nothing to you yet. If your record says "one hand, in the dark", you will find there are filters for exactly that. If your record says nothing about writing, you have just eliminated a whole family of expensive devices without doing any research at all.

Recent changes worth a line in your record

A few things shifted in the last couple of months that change what an owner can read or do, and all of them are shipping now rather than announced.

The first is about library loans on Kindle. Amazon's firmware versions five point nineteen point five and five point nineteen point six close a loophole that borrowers had been using: keeping a device offline so an expired library loan stayed readable. Opening an expired title offline now forces a reconnection prompt, and the book stays locked until the loan status is verified. This is shipping over the air and by manual sideload, and it affects modern devices — the eleventh and twelfth generation Paperwhite, the Colorsoft, the Scribe — running firmware in the five point nineteen point two through five point nineteen point six range, mainly library borrowers on United States accounts. There is also an A and B rollout replacing the Collections feature with Tags, which means two owners of the same model may see different names for the same thing. If you already own one of these, check your firmware under Settings, then Device Options, then Device Info. If you do not own one yet, the action is a line in your record: if you borrow from a library, write down that a loan is time-limited access and not a file you hold, and that this is a route to test rather than assume.

The second is on Kobo. Firmware four point four six fixes on-device store checkout and payment verification, which had been failing because of updated security certificate requirements, and it adds backend support for syncing your reading with the tracking service StoryGraph. It is rolling out over the air and by manual download for current models including the Libra Colour, the Clara Colour and the Clara BW, across all Rakuten Kobo regions. Owners can confirm the version under More, then Settings, then Device Information. The wider point for your record is that buying directly on the device is a route that can break and be repaired, which is worth writing down as something to verify rather than take for granted.

The third is smaller but it touches document access. The Boox Palma 2 Pro shipped in August of twenty twenty-six with a hybrid dual-SIM tray, meaning cellular mobile data for downloading and syncing reading material with no Wi-Fi involved. These are shipping retail units running Android with Google Play. If your record says you read somewhere without reliable Wi-Fi — a commute, a cabin, a hospital waiting room — add a line saying so, because that is a requirement most records never mention and it quietly rules devices in and out.

Which brings me back to the only thing I want you to actually do. Open a folder, pick one real document, and try to make the text bigger. Whatever happens, write down what happened. That is line one.