So I have had a kindle for a number of years at this point. On the most Im fairly ambivalent towards it and the way I view it, for me it fills a role and completes a task and that is that. It has books on it and you can read them. I dabbled with it on and off for about 2 or 3 years whilst always preferring paper which all changed when I went through one of life's big upheavals. I became a parent. Which if you've been there you know and if you haven't well you just don't and you won't until you do, people without children don't know how lucky they have it! I surely didn't! What this meant for me and my partner was a lot of looking after our child and not necessarily being somewhere with a light on on account of the sleeping baby. This is when the kindle with its built in backlight came into its own and I started to value the potential of the e-book type hardware. I could not tell you what type of kindle I have, it was off ebay and cost about £11, I had to find out what model it was to go through what is explained next however, I have long since forgotten.

I was enjoying reading again as I could do it when I liked. 3am after my child woke me up and I could not find slumber again, no problem. 11pm after feeding them and trying to nod off, absolutely. On a park bench while they slept and I wished I was made of caffeine? You Bet! The most annoying thing about it is that kindle is linked to Amazon the business and they force you down their infrastructure hole. You cannot have anything not linked to Amazon basically which makes loading ebooks of all types and file formats incredibly annoying and frustrating. You have to use their propriety service which doesn't do anything except convert whatever file format you have to the kindle format and introduce a lot of ghost symbols and corrupted text into your otherwise fine file. The upside to this is torrenting any book you could ever want to read or collect. Torrents are brilliant and I was a part of the initial torrent de force in the 2000's and all my favourite music and films were all torrented and actually it solves a lot of the problems that exist and with the streaming companies now forming a monopoly and freezing and reducing payments to artists or creators, who cares if you rip off Netfucks or Amazon Srime? Amazon's film and tv output is absolute shite. So year I ripped of a load of books, sorry HarperCollins.

It was while I was putting up with this crappy film convert workaround that I discovered the idea of jailbreaking the Kindle which I tried and it is fantastic. If you have a Kindle, you must jailbreak it. It is like a new device with so much more functionality and ease of use. Now I can just maintain my book library and push new books to my device through Calibre (an ebook library tool). In that sense it is very much like a library, its free, open and modular to what you are wanting to read. Currently I have a Zizek book on the go, a history of coffee and a novel by some fella called Knausgaard. When the Kindle eventually craps out and passes its battery out of its own arse I will replace it as you see it has gone from being a niche product that has a corner and can't find itself out of it. Like a phoenix it is reborn as an essential gadget, like house keys, that travels around with me and better still when I suck on it to nourish myself it feeds my brain with its contained sentences and ideas as it isn't a device at all is it. It is a book and that is what books do. They help.