Not the Kindle I was waiting for.

I had an email from the Beast this morning, inviting me to drop a couple of hundred dollars I didn’t have on a shiny object I didn’t need.

A colour e-ink Kindle.

No, Jeff. Not today.

Although I do dips me lid to the marketing genius who came up with the same Colorsoft. It takes the screaming weakness of this technology, its inability to display clear crisp colours that pop off the screen, and turns it into a sellable virtue.

After all who really needs colours so hard and bright they cut and burn your retinas down at the molecular level. No, what you want is something kinder, softer, mushier.

But honestly, all I want is a stupid little phone-sized Kindle, or Kobo or whatever, that I can carry around with me all day instead of my phone so that when the dopamine thirst starts singing, I can whip out my wordslab and read something other than social media.

Boox already makes exactly what I want.

The Palma.

But everything I’ve read about it tells me it’s about twice as expensive as it should be for what it offers: a convenient, palm-sized single-function text reader. The sort of device you’d never use to visit Facebook or TikTok or the open sewer of shitinformation formerly known as Twitter, because the screen is terrible for that stuff.

But good for reading.

And yes, yes, I know I could just carry a book. If that book was the size of a phone. But even mass-market paperbacks don’t fit into a pocket. It makes me wonder if there might be a market for a much smaller hard copy book size.