Experiments in Reading

January 28, 2017 - By

What a gift reading is.

Communication and language are at the heart of what it means to be in society, community, relationship, and to express ourselves. These things are fundamental to everything we do. Reading is a massive part of this.

Learning and literacy go hand in hand for me. I often marvel that the beautiful shapes that make up the building blocks of our language. It’s incredible that arranged in a specific order these shapes have the power to change and affect me so much; laughter, tears, and yes even actually fainting once. I sometimes like to look at a word until it loses meaning; or imagine a letter as just a collection of shapes. From its smallest pieces to its biggest ideas, from formal instruction to casual communication, reading is the foundation of many of my favourite things to do.

My own history of reading takes a sharp took a sharp decline when I came into full access of broadband Internet, but in recent years has flourished again. In the past 18 months I’ve been experimenting with reading in a number of ways that I thought I’d share in a collection of posts that I hope will be of benefit to others. I’m making this new Reading & Study post category accordingly.

Reading Experiments

Part of the reason I want to share this is so I can supplement in-person conversations with links afterward. These posts will likely be updated as my experiments expand and evolve.

  1. Kindle Reading Tricks
  2. Kindle Study Tricks
  3. Self-imposed book reports
  4. Accessibility and Speed Listening
  5. Silence: the blessings of not consuming

An aside about the Amazon Kindle

The first two aforementioned posts have been very Kindle-oriented post (the physical device specifically, not the mobile app). If you’re not using that platform I hope these posts are still of use.

I’m not an Amazon fanboy by any means, but I have a Kindle v4 and think it is pretty great; it’s light weight, easy to use, and the battery is measured in weeks, not hours. While 2GB isn’t much, it holds a baffling amount of content (consider a filing cabinet can be a modest 75MB, this is over 25 filing cabinets. As soon as I start reading on this device it “disappears”. Kindle isn’t perfect, I have gripes too (mostly ecosystem rather than device), but for my purposes it’s been great. The v3 (the last Kindle to have a keyboard) was even better in my opinion; I found it more comfortable to hold and it had a Text To Speech (TTS) option.

One day hoping for a decent mainstream Android e-ink device (or to be brave enough to try one from Ali Express), and jam up my Google Drive in this way. I’d love to hear any tricks or alternate device thoughts.

Enjoy!

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This post was written by ArleyM