The $100 purchase that changed my life
(This is not an ad)
Happy Amazon Prime Day, valued subscriber!
In the spirit of Amazon Presents: July, A Prime Exclusive, I wanted to share how a single device has fundamentally reignited my love for reading: my recently purchased Kindle.
At the encouragement of a Camp Friend of the Mailing List, I finally bought one this January.
This did not come without years of resistance on my part.
I love the feeling of becoming engrossed in a completely separate, non-digital world.
Of watching the physical dent I’m making in a book grow as I progress.
Of being able to visually flip back to a referenced character or piece of context located earlier on in the story, because I distinctly remember reading it on the upper left-hand side of a page, about 20% of the way through the book.
And of course, that nostalgic, inviting smell.
I feared a Kindle would undermine the connection I feel to an author’s words.
That it would be a dystopian facsimile directly funding the most evil company in the world, further confining me to an increasingly digital consumption diet.
But then last December I had the harrowing realization that I didn’t read a single a book in 2023.
I tried to think really hard as to why.
As a kid, I devoured books. I would go to my local library on what felt like a weekly basis, checking out multiple titles at a time. To this day, I am still a proud card carrier of both the Chicago (CPL) and New York (NYPL) public library systems.
However, my options have always been limited to what’s available in the LARGE PRINT section, on account of my visual impairment. Despite both cities boasting dozens of libraries within their ecosystems, the pickings are slim.
Not to mention, LARGE PRINT books are… LARGE!
For instance, think about how many more pages this email would take up if you printed it out in this “Article Heading 1” size font, which is what I personally need to comfortably read it.
I actually always write my articles in this font, than adjust the size back to “Normal text”, so that all of you can read them more easily.
One time in 7th grade, I received lower marks on a Science paper because I forgot to change the font back to the mandated, double-spaced, Times New Roman Size 12 before turning it in.
My teacher explained that my essay was too spread out for her to keep track of.
She would lose her place, or get confused, because a sentence would start on one page and end on another.
This was a big inconvenience, you see, as it required extra time and attention to review.
The poor thing.
I can only imagine how difficult her life would be if LARGE PRINT font was the only way by which she could engage with the written word.
I digress…
This condition is particularly frustrating because I love reading longform pieces that send me down internet rabbit holes, and allow me to learn a new 50-cent word now and then.
When I was still living in Chicago in 2019, I read The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, which is 568 pages in its standard print. The LARGE PRINT version I found at the Lincoln Belmont library was twice the size of its counterpart, and pushing 900 pages.
Every day, for a little over two months, I would spend my 20-25 minute commute from Lakeview to downtown Chicago utterly consumed by this novel.
It remains one of the best books I’ve ever read. It made me weep, and laugh, and routinely left me spellbound by so many of its brilliantly written passages.
But Franzen tends to use a word like “deleterious” or “mendacity” on every other page.
Determined to understand every word, and properly appreciate the Pulitzer Prize finalist, I downloaded the Merriam-Webster Dictionary app for my iPhone.
I’d sit on the Brown Line with a book the size of a laptop in one hand, and my iPhone on my lap. I would have held it in my other hand, but I had a full cast covering it on account of a botched surgery on a broken finger1.
Unfortunately, every time I looked up a “recalcitrant” or “Weltschmerz” on the app, I would get distracted by iMessage notifications and NBA news and everything else that comes with having a Swiss-Army Supercomputer in our pockets at all times.
So I bought a Merriam-Webster pocket dictionary – which seemed like a great idea, until I couldn’t read a single word in it, even with my handheld magnifying glass.
So I overcompensated, and bought a LARGE PRINT Merriam-Webster dictionary, which might famously be the biggest possible version of the longest possible book. It took up even more space in my work bag than the actual book I was intending to read!
In retrospect, this combination must have been quite the sight for the other 9-to-5’ers on my daily journey: a one-handed, young professional in business attire and sunglasses, absolutely riveted by what could only be both the New and Old Testament.
Finally, I bought a LARGE PRINT pocket dictionary, which is a bit of an oxymoron, but got the job done enough for me to finish each ride without my head spinning.
Needless to say, I only made it through about 50 pages of Infinite Jest2 when I gave it a shot during the pandemic. I also re-read a ton of old books from childhood during that time, completely oblivious to the fact that a key reason I could do this was because every book I ever read growing up or while in school was in LARGE PRINT.
When I moved to New York in 2022, I was able to find Franzen’s newest effort, Crossroads, at a branch in Midtown. Arrogantly recommend. They held a few other interesting titles that I raced through, but the LARGE PRINT section of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation library, the NYPL flagship branch, is fairly limited.
So I read a ton of David Sedaris essay collections for the rest of 2022, and then… nothing last year. Only when I recently decided to embrace my albinism did I understand how much of a factor accessibility was playing into my reading habits.
Enter - the Kindle.
The ultimate decision was made after my friend showed me a website called libgen.is.
You simply type in the title you’re looking for, download the EPUB file, and email it to your built-in Kindle address, which automatically uploads the file to your device.
The process has an old-school, janky, LimeWire-esque flavor to it.
You feel a bit like you’re hacking the system, and that you might download some malware. Only instead of bootleg interruptions from DJ Ill-Will and DJ Rockstar, you might have an errant ‘rn’ turn into an ‘m’.
Of course, as someone who values supporting artists as directly as possible (a large part of why I’ve been hesitant to torrent over the years), this method initially made me bristle. I’d prefer to pay the artist directly. But if I could check out these same books for free at my local library anyways, what, really, is the difference?
And to that last point, I actually can’t check them out from my local library.
After blazing through the first few titles I downloaded, I spent a giddy, manic evening downloading every heretofore inaccessible book that had forever been on my reading list, and haven’t looked back.
The accessibility features are simply a game-changer.
The e-ink display is far gentler on my eyes than the harsh blue light from an iPhone.
You can adjust the brightness and font size as you see fit, and have a built-in search bar, dictionary, Wikipedia look-up, and translate option at the simple click of a word.3
There’s also a Dark Mode, which inverts the colors and makes reading at night a pleasurable and comfortable experience again.
It's become my new nighttime ritual, and I’m happy to report that I’ve already read 20+ books in 2024. That’s more than I’ve managed in the past two years combined!
I’m reading everything from Michael Lewis books to the young-adult fiction that was slightly too headache-inducing for the boy writing his Science papers in 36 pt font.
I ripped through all the Harry Potter and Hunger Games books, albeit 15 years late.
And I finally read A Confederacy of Dunces, a small-print copy of which had been gifted to me by a summer camp counselor 10+ years ago, and has collected dust on every bookshelf I’ve owned since.
Plus, all those initial fears I had were completely misplaced.
I’m just as engaged as I was when I was a kid, and there’s a progress bar that not only shows what percentage of the way you are through the book, but tracks your reading speed, and estimates how many minutes it’ll take you to reach the end of the chapter.
Getting a Kindle has reminded me why I fell in love with reading in the first place.
It wasn't just about the stories I was reading – it was because I could read them.
And although there may not be that “new book smell”, if it means I’m trading scent for sight, I’ll make that deal any day of the week.
David Zucker is a digital marketing consultant and newfound digital reading enthusiast based in New York City. A former analyst at TikTok, his unique, data-driven approach has catapulted the growth of his clients’ audiences all over the world. He also happens to have oculocutaneous albinism, a rare genetic disorder which effectively renders him legally blind. This condition offers him a unique perspective on a whole host of things, especially with respect to accessibility.
(This 2-year injury and recovery process is why I don’t go for nearly as many offensive rebounds as I used to…)
It was the footnotes that really made it impossible.
If only there was a way to export all the highlighted words to a Quizlet so that I could finally commit the definition of words like “harangue” to memory.