My phone is an ereader now

Summary

My phone is an ereader now August 30, 2025 I got a Kobo in 2016 after borrowing my mom's old one for a year before that. It probably is responsible for getting me reading again after high school. I used to be an avid reader, the sort of kid who would have to be told to put down the book and go to sleep, and who would then creep slowly to the bookshelf to pick it up again without arousing suspicion after the light had been turned out. I think I slowed my reading for fun as the work load of school increased, and stopped when moving every four months for internships in university. Having something small and portable that I could load books onto changed that and got my momentum going again. I now loosely grade how much I'm thriving by how much I'm reading, as an indirect indicator of how not burnt out I am.It fared me quite well, but I had a few issues with it. Library books would randomly not work on it, even if they would show up on, for example, the Libby app on my phone. It also came with a way to sync articles to it via Pocket, but it always required a little too much forethought for me: I had to remember to find and save articles beforehand in order to then read them later. There were some services to do this automatically via RSS but the syncing process itself was just slow enough that I found myself rarely doing it. Also, Mozilla has now killed Pocket as a service. In the middle of writing this, they announced support for Instapaper instead, but it has the same workflow issues for me. My partner reads on her phone, but something about reading on a screen grates on me after a while, and makes it too easy to jump to something else.So I was intrigued when I heard about the Minimal Phone, an Android phone with an epaper display. It wasn't the first epaper Android device I'd seen—I've seen reviews saying the Boox Palma is actually pretty great—but it was the idea of this being an actual phone that can take a sim card that really get me interested. What if I could rea...