A better disaster than, say, YouTube, but fits that pattern. While I ultimately believe ebooks are a great improvement to civilisation (and forests), I have to agree with the more luddite voices (=my wife) that to kids’ attention span, this is a disaster. To their discredit, Kobo (and I’m guessing, other ebook companies) is no help here: the homescreen of these devices is not very dissimilar from that of an engagement driven web portal, full of calls-to-action to get more Kobo Plus stuff, browse your library, organise your library, reorganise your library, read this, read that… Instead of displaying one big-ass widget with your current read. Switching back and forth between books, skimming them, but not reading them.

This, like all screen related things, has led to degradation of attention.

Reading Ben Rhodes’ 2021 book (After the Fall) on my 2011 nook I actually still have my old Barnes&Noble nook Simple Touch, which was (I think) the first (quirky) touchscreen eink reader, rocking Android 2.1, and which I love and still use 1, although it doesn’t connect to the internet anymore, plus it’s not a Kobo so there is another “2021” problem reading the typically DRM’ed books that I bought via Kobo (or bol.com, Kobo’s NL shield company)… but more on this too, below. We have 2 Kobo devices, which are supposed to be the “family ebook readers”, but are almost exclusively used by the kids. The flipside of this though, like with all things 2021, is over-digitisation, if such a word exists: like with their school related screen time, most of their reading is on an ebook reader. I get many jealous looks during the meetings of the secret society of parents. They read in the car, they read in the evenings, they read when they read just out of sheer boredom. The area where I didn’t expect I would have to uncloud is books, but behold, it is happening.

Kobo dedrm