March 4, 2023
New Kindle
Since my Kindle Paperwhite was dying—the backlight would flicker and change for a while whenever I would turn pages, and it took forever to do anything, especially looking up words—so I decided to trade it in for a new one: a 2023 Kindle Oasis. While there was a bot of a shipping delay, for some reason, the device showed up well before the April 9 delivery date. Thank goodness—otherwise I would have been forced to read a real book.
The Oasis set up easily and quickly. However, content I loaded manually was not there—including Blindsight, the novel I was currently reading on my dying Paperwhite, but that was no big deal. Unfortunately, when I loaded it back on, the Oasis treated it like a new book, so I had no idea where I was in the novel, and of course it has no chapters. I had planned to finish the book, though I wasn’t enjoying it all that much—probably because I wasn’t reading as consistently as I normally do. So, I just put it aside and started another Alastair Reynolds novel House of Suns. It picks up the world he introduced in the novella Thousandth Night. It has dual protagonists, Campion and Purslane, the same consorts from the novella. So far, I’m enjoying it. Maybe I’ll come back to the Watts’ novel later. I’m running out of Reynolds’ stuff anyway.
The Oasis is very nice. It’s faster than its little brother, and it has mechanical buttons to turn pages. It also adjusts the backlight automatically, and changes its warmth depending on the time of day. The screen is a bit larger, as is the device. I like the aluminum body, but its larger width makes it a bit more awkward to hold. I put some of my books on it manually, but decided to set up email loading books via Amazon and email content as I need it. I notice that content I sent via email was reloaded to the Oasis automatically, so this seems the way to go.
I was sorry to have to replace the Paperwhite, as it did its job well until it didn’t. Amazon gave my $50 for it, so it cost me about $30 to use for five years—not including content. Not bad.
