I recently read a Wall Street Journal¹ article about kindles having a resurgence amongst young readers, which resonated with me since I love my kindle too.

I have a 5+ yr old kindle paperwhite and it is easily the most well built techy thing I own. It is solid in your hands, and even though it’s been dropped countless times, everything seems to work perfectly. It always amazed me that I can pick it up after a month and see that the battery percentage has barely shifted.

Keeping my kindle always in my bag allows me to truly read anything anywhere2 - on long metro rides, in office cafeterias, etc. Its truly a compliment to the kindle that I was able to get through multiple Murakami and Mishima books and the Blood Meridian just by reading while on the metro to work and while eating in the cafeteria. The quality-of-life features have really improved the reading experience for me. Looking at word meanings, wikipedia entry, and using the X-Ray3 feature really helps when reading a hard book. The kindle is also great for reading the odd long pdf for work and random epubs from the internet.

It truly is one of the best consumer tech products to come from Amazon in the last 20 years. Amazon’s strict focus on almost never deprecating anything and operational excellence have really helped kindle stay great for customers all this while. It’s great to be a customer of Amazon now, in contrast to being an employee and seeing how the sausage is made on the other side.4

If someone is a semi-serious reader, it’s a no-brainer, low-hanging-fruit type decision to get a kindle, considering how much better the reading experience is compared to the alternatives (phone, physical book, laptop).