In the digital age, a lot of magazine publishers, such as Aeon, The New Yorker put the contents online. These contents are usually long form, high quality essays that require at least 10 ~ 15 minutes of intense reading to complete. I love reading these essays, but staring into the LED screen and reading them through is really a pain for my eyes.
Not only that, because of the glare, usually I won’t be able to finish reading them in one seating. I wish to read more magazine articles and essays ( in addition to books), but the nature of the laptops and smartphones, and our ever dwindling attention span make it quite impossible to do so.
Long form reading materials — be it books or just essays– should be consumed on e-ink readers if you really value your eyes and if you really want to get the best contents out of them.
Thankfully, with the app Pocket on my Boox ereader, I can now start reading Aeon’s essays again! Pocket– previously known as Read it Later– is an application for managing a reading list of articles from the Internet. The original function was to allow the user to save an article for later reading. However, with the advent of ebook readers, the proper function now is to allow the user to save an article so that one can read it on an ebook reader, like how you would read a real book or magazine, over a coffee table.
After downloading and installing the Pocket app on my BOOX Android eReader, here’s the main page:
I’m still building my reading list for this Pocket account
It contains all of the articles that I saved before.
Here’s an article Do antidepressants work? that I saved from the Aeon magazine. Here’s how it looks like on the web:
“Do antidepressants work? ” in web form
Do antidepressants work? the essay
It’s a massive 3000 word, thought provoking essay that might require multiple readings in order for one to fully digest. Reading this kind of essays over a web browser is definitely a no no; I’m pretty sure by the middle of the essays, your mind has already drifted to somewhere else and you are busy switching tabs or already calling it quit.
Reading it on an ebook reader, however, presents a different scenario. Because ebook reader is black-and-white, and you can’t do much except reading, and your eyes won’t hurt.
“Do antidepressants work?” on Boox. The image is black and white on Boox, but when I save it, it becomes colorful again. It’s an amazing feature that only Boox Max Pro, the 13 inch Boox ereader has.
Pocket also contains a feature “Discover“, that allows you to discover what are the essays that other people are now reading:
Discover section
It’s a like social reading club, and the whole Internet is involved.
Or maybe, you want to narrow down your discovery list, in that case, you can add friends to your account, so that you can follow your friend’s reading activity. It’s just like goodreads.
Your friend’s reading activity
Conclusion:
With Boox, you can read ebooks from a variety of bookstores, and you can also read essays and articles that you save from the web. Pocket App is a must have, if you read a lot on the Internet.
