Our new Kobo Vox arrived yesterday.

I resisted the eBook revolution for a long time but Ann persuaded me to buy her one for her birthday last year. I borrowed it to read William Gibson’s Zero History and was immediately hooked. She has her first generation Kobo, I have a 3rd generation Kindle. I see the Kindle as the Rolls Royce of ereaders, high quality and until recently, a bit expensive. The Kobo is nice, very light, although the first generation is a bit slow to start up, particularly compared to my Kindle. Maybe the newer ones have improved, I don’t know.

Even though I have an ereader, I still buy physical books. I love the look and feel and smell of real printed books and I’ve spent over $400 on them over the last 3-4 weeks* but the ereaders have rekindled (do you see what I did there?) my love of reading. I’m reading a lot more books since I got my Kindle and I’m reading more broadly. In particular I’m picking up random self-published books by authors I’ve never heard of. Some of them I enjoy, some of them I don’t but either way I’m discovering authors that I never would have found otherwise. I’m also building a growing collection of unread ebooks – it’s just too easy to buy them – but we won’t talk about that. I am uneasy about Amazon’s proprietary format and their dominance of the market, but that’s a topic for another day perhaps.

The Vox is basically a 7″ Android tablet that places the Kobo reading app front and center. Setup was fairly quick, although there’s already a firmware update even though the device came out less than a week ago. Once it was set up we left it downloading the few dozen books Ann has bought over the last eighteen months. That took a while over my newly “upgraded” Internet connection so we didn’t get to try it out properly but first impressions are good, although it seems a lot heavier than the original Kobo and of course the battery life on a tablet is far shorter than a dedicated ereader.

There was also writing yesterday – 523 words on Rainshine and I’m a lot happier with the story than I was. Still hoping to finish it over the weekend but other obligations are starting to mount up.

* Results not typical.