The Person Who Bought the Book Isn’t Always the Person Who Reads It
I thought I was choosing an ereader. I was really deciding who I wanted to support.
Tell me if you can relate: You’re at a bookstore. The smell of coffee drifts from the cafe. Fellow readers huddle around the shelves, quietly murmuring with each other. A kid laughs. You look at the brand-new books laid out on a table, their covers like siren calls. You pick up one with the best cover and read the description. Something in you clicks and then you create the fantasy: you imagine yourself reading it in your own home, maybe with tea in your favorite mug. Maybe you’re on the couch, feet curled under you, a fire in the fireplace. You project the sight of pages full of annotations or a conversation with a friend about how good the author did with the story.
You buy the book, those fantasy visions filling your mind. You can’t wait to fulfill that dream, to be the person who reads this book.
Then reality crashes: day job, parenting, fitness excuses, work, the lure of TV and the magnitude of choices that intrude into your daily life. The book sits on the coffee table, next to the bed, on your To Be Read stack. That stack begins to look like a sedimentary rock formation, the spines coming across as different layers, different fantasies you created about yourself, now solidifying like fossils. Maybe that book gets read, but maybe you never open it again because the person who bought it and the person who lives your daily life are not always the same person.
I often bought books for an imaginary version of myself.
Know what I mean?
It frustrated me, if I’m being honest, but I kept on doing it, buying books for the fantasy version of myself. Yeah, the bookshelves look great, but how many trips did I take to Half Price Books over the year with bags full of books I thought I wanted to read?
The pattern continued with ereaders, but with the added layer of crafting the fantasy person who read, say, a Barnes and Noble Nook. Or the pair of Kobo ereaders I bought years ago. Throw in the Kindle Fire device (now I can read comics!), an older Kindle Paperwhite. Then a modern Paperwhite, a Kobo Clara BW, and, oddly, a Matcha Kindle basic.
Every device represented a different version of myself. Maybe this device would be—finally!—the one that let me stop thinking about the device and just read. I even bought a Paperwhite Colorsoft thinking that this would be my One True Device, the one way of reading.
But guess what happened? Each new device came with specs I thought would be the key to being The One: better and better DPI, a different ecosystem (Nook, Kobo, Kindle), a unique reading environment. Front light! Oooh, warm light! Oh, and I can load up these devices with how many books?! A library in my pocket.
Over the years, all but the Paperwhite, the Clara BW, and the Matcha Kindle ended up in a drawer. I returned the Colorsoft. They were experiments that didn’t pan out, fantasies that didn’t materialize. So I had three ereaders, two different ecosystems, and one guy who simply wanted to read.
But when it came time to pick one up and read, I faced decision paralysis: which one? I like the Paperwhite’s 7-in. surface area but the flush screen made the text ever so slightly fuzzier (yeah, I can tell). I like the form factor of the recessed 6-in. screen for both the Clara BW and the Matcha but I found I kind of like the warm light ambience of the Clara BW.
Many days succumbed to little-to-no reading because I found myself picking up one, then another, and then the third. I wanted to read more, but I didn’t really want to think about which device to use. After all, when you buy the latest paperback from Elin Hilderbrand or James Patterson, you just pick up the book and read, right?
An idea struck me. I thought I was planning an experiment about ereaders. It turned out to be about something much larger.
The Ereader Experiment
What would it be like if I merely used one device to read?
An earlier version of myself would obsess over which device was “the best.” Which device had the best specs, the best hand feel, the one capable of comfortably being with me during my reading times. That younger me would have definitely pored over the specs, but that’s not what I wanted to do this time.
I merely wanted to remove one decision from my daily life. Without the choice of device, the decision narrowed down to a simple one: did I want to read or not? The answer was nearly always yes.
For the month of July, I used a single device. Everything I wanted to read was loaded onto it. That device would be the one I carried with me around the house: morning reading sessions over coffee, evening reading sessions on the couch, resting with me on the bedside table.
I ended up choosing the Kobo Clara BW. It had the 6-in. form factor, a recessed screen, a front light with the warmth setting, and the ability to sync with my Libby app for library books. I have it—and the Paperwhite and Matcha—in a covered case that turns on the device when I open the cover. It has that amazing “book feel” and I’m not sure why I waited so long to get one. I have Calibre on my Mac and that enabled me not only to selectively load which books I wanted, but it can also collate any annotations I made.
For thirty-one days, if there was a book I wanted to read, I simply picked up the Clara. No internal debate. No comparison. No optimization.
Just reading.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but I wasn’t really running an ereader experiment. I was testing what happened when I stopped trying to optimize every choice. One less daily decision to make. One more lifelong behavior reinforced. And one more instance of a pattern I’ve developed for the past couple of decades.
Pattern Recognition
Nearly everyone reading this won’t know this but if you see me during a typical work week, you’ll notice a pattern. Five days in the office, five pants: one blue, one gray, two khakis, and jeans. I defaulted to the dark pants on Monday and Wednesday, the khaki-colored ones on Tuesday and Thursday, and the jeans on Friday. Certain shirts go with certain pants. So my decisions for what to wear on any given work day boiled down to an extremely small variation. In essence, I made the decision once so I wouldn’t have to keep making it. Ditto my weekday lunches and breakfasts.
My lunch hour is where I do part of my daily fiction writing. Not sure why or how I started this behavior, but I break up my 60 minutes into four 13-minute sessions. I set a timer on my phone and write. This is actually a Pomodoro-type thing. I repeat the action four times an hour which gives me eight minutes to either write a last little bit or prep for the afternoon’s work. And I don’t even think about it anymore. I literally leave my desk with my Chromebook (that I only use to write), find an empty office, set the timer, and go.
In July, the Kobo Clara BW was added to this default list. But here’s the thing: none of these systems prevented me from making a different choice. They just made the default effortless.
Later, I discovered there was a word for this: satisficing. Paraphrasing the definitions I’ve read, satisficing is the idea that instead of optimizing every decision or tool, you pick one that’s “good enough” and move on. It’s a lower-friction path through life.
Decide once. Reuse that decision.
There’s a lightness that comes from living a life filled with satisficing, from making fewer choices. I don’t have to think about what to wear on a Wednesday. I don’t have to think about what to eat for lunch on Fridays. And in the month of July, I didn’t have to think about what device I used to read.
And I also didn’t have to deal with the seduction of possibility.
The Seduction of the Imaginary Self
It turns out I don’t only buy imaginary reading lives. I also buy imaginary productive lives.
Ever since I got my iPhone back in 2016, I centered lots of my life around it. Sounds weird, but many of us do this even if we don’t realize we do it. I’m not obsessive about it. I have only message notification enabled so the phone remains largely silent until I intentionally pick it up. I can easily put it down and focus on a TV show, content to let my brain churn through where I’ve seen that actress on this new series I’m watching instead of picking up the phone, finding the answer, but missing key plot points. If, by the end of the episode, the brain hasn’t connected the dots, I’ll then look up what I need.
That behavior I had with books and ereaders? Well, with the iPhone, now I had To Do apps to contend with. And I think I tried them all. What about this one? Nope, didn’t like the interface. That one? Didn’t want to subscribe. Aha! This is the one! No, it’s not because I spent too much time fiddling with options and getting it just right that the mere action of fiddling with a To Do app consumed my time and I didn’t have time to do the things on the list.
The mythical perfect To Do app became another fantasy. They weren’t lies, per se, but they were imagined futures. But I want to point out that my problem wasn’t with the imagination itself. It was mistaking the imagination as evidence.
The Reader I Actually Am
And what story was my imagination telling me about the kind of reader I am? Well, the imaginary reader in the past was the one who stood in a bookstore, bought a book, and imagined himself reading in that fantasy world before real life crashed through. The imaginary version of myself had the perfect To Do app with the perfect workflow that I tweaked frequently until the tweaking became the thing I did. And I was the guy who bought different ereaders with different ecosystems, thinking that this new one would allow me to read more…until it didn’t.
Who am I, really? The same person I’ve been ever since I learned to read: a reader. Who reads daily. Loves fiction, non-fiction, comics, magazines. I used to buy only physical books because that’s all there was. Now, I have devices. When I’m not buying comics from my local comic store, my iPad Pro is the single device I use for reading comics. When I buy a book from a bookstore or check out a book from the library, I pick up the book. And for the past month, when I’ve wanted to read something on an ereader, I picked up the Clara BW.
Turns out, in a world of near endless possibilities, having constructive constraints actually helps me stay focused on the things I care about most: my attention, my time, and my focus. Even though I have over a hundred books on the Clara BW, I have found that nearly everything I’ve read this month—from Proverbs to Ryan Holiday’s The Daily Stoic to Robert Greene’s The Daily Laws to the pair of novels I’ve started—are all on page one of the device, which displays only five books in list view. Occasionally, I’ve swiped over to page two, but rarely. I do the same on my iPhone where all my main apps are on page one of the screen.
Constraints don’t hamper me. They free me to enjoy the device intentionally and then get on with living. Apparently, I don’t need unlimited choice at my fingertips. I need the handful of things I actually use to be easy to reach.
The Plot Twist
Of course, the irony about all this thought behind reading and this month-long experiment: I listen to more audiobooks than I read.
Audiobooks simply work with nearly zero friction. I either check out an audiobook on Libby and listen to it in that app or use Audible. I push play, drop the phone in my pocket, and the book meets me in my real—not imagined—life: driving, walking, washing dishes, doing chores, exercising, or at Trader Joe’s.
Funny, huh? My most-used reading device has no screen at all.
The Person I Really Want to Help
I’ve never stopped going to bookstores. Never will. I love them and when I travel, bookstores are always on my agenda. But I know myself well enough now to meet my inner fantasy self and have a real-world discussion with clear-eyed intent. If I can truly see myself reading the book in my actual real life, I get it. If not, I wait. I’ll add the book to my giant text file of books that piqued my attention, but I have to possess the intention to really read it. And I make use of my local libraries extensively. (BTW, if you have the Libby app linked to your local public library, check out Reciprocard and see how many nearby libraries you may be eligible for.)
When it comes to ereaders, I’ll always be curious about new ones: updated specs, larger screens for more text per screen, improved eink color screens, smaller devices that are the size of phones, and others I don’t even know about yet. But the threshold these future devices would have to clear is the real-world version of myself: with a default choice of ereader I already own, how would this new device fit into my daily life? Does this device support the life I already have?
Or, in other words, given the equilibrium I have created in my life, how do I stop buying tools for my imaginary self and start supporting my actual self?
Because the person I want to become probably doesn’t need another device. He probably just needs to pick up the one already on the table.