Small acts of resistance
I have done two small “acts of resistance” lately. One is somewhat revealed by the featured image above as I have finally replaced my old Kindle Paperwhite with a Kobo Clara BW.
I have for a long time wanted to replace the Kindle as I did not want an e-reader from Amazon anymore. I very rarely used the Amazon store to buy books for it as I primarily loaded books into it by using Calibre and mostly relying on the huge back-catalog of Standard Ebooks to fill it.
I also tried my best to limit the wifi-connectivity to avoid it sharing any of my reading-habits with Amazon, but as I also used it to read Instapaper collections I sometimes had to turn the Wifi on to retrieve those. Alternatively I could of course have used Calibre for the same functionality.
And finally I was just annoyed that it presented ads for book on the screen when the screen is locked. Maybe I could keep my bedroom somewhat free of ads.
I was thinking of the Kobo Clara as the obvious choice for some time, but could not justify buying a new e-reader when the old one still worked - even with all its drawbacks.
But recently the battery really started draining quickly on the Kindle, so I took this as the final sign to buy the Kobo Clara BW instead.
Initial impression
My initial impression is positive. I love that I have finally broken the bond with Amazon. I like that it is slightly smaller than the Paperwhite I have (4th generation if I remember correctly), but I must say that they messed up with regards to material on the Kobo. It is so hard and slippery as opposed to the Kindle. I will surely have to find a solution with some wrap, tape or the like to make up for it because I keep dropping it. Let me know if you know of a good solution here.
I also really like the Dark Mode of the Kobo as I read most of the time at night in bed.
Kobo Instapaper integration
One thing I had expected to be worse with the Kobo was the integration with Instapaper. I had collections sent to my Kindle from Instapaper and as far as I could see they did not offer anything similar for Kobo. So I expected to have to create the collections myself in Calibre and then transfer them manually.
But I was surprised to learn that from the Kobo you can log in to your Instapaper account and then have all articles available directly on the device. This is an even better solution than the one offered for the Kindle. It even keeps me from having to have a paid version of Instapaper to have articles directly on the e-reader.
Second act of resistance
The second act of resistance was to migrate away from Google’s Feedly. It was actually not something I had thought that much about and it won’t be the biggest of difference, but I randomly found that Nextcloud had an RSS reader app called News. So I think I spent the grand total of 30 minutes figuring out how to use it, how to migrate and actually doing so. It went so well that I just decided to delete my Feedly account immediately.
That felt better than what I had expected.
A big upside is that the “Nextcloud News” app on iPhone is extremely good and pleasant to use. They have really nailed the design and typeface. I like it way more than the Feedly app.