Today, the world of printed media has changed from what it used to be a decade ago. The era of ereaders saw that many popular book stores going out of business (read landmark). For a long time I was a nonjoinder, and continued to read only the physical books. I thought the feeling of holding a physical book on hand and being able to turn to which ever page in a random way gave immense flexibility compared to an ereader.
Ten years back I felt that I should experiment with an ereader. At that time kindle was not easily available in India. A bangalore based company named EC Media was producing an ereader by the name "Wink". It costed 9000/- for its ereader. I made the purchase in crossword bookstore in alwarpet.
Soon, Amazon's Kindle became very famous in India and killed Wink.
From 2010 to 2015 I used Wink sparingly and read few books out of it. But I felt that it cannot replace the feeling of reading a physical book and had to put down Wink out of sight for a long time. As the number of books in my possession started to increase, I felt a need for an alternative. There are no good libraries near me. So I started buying used books from Amazon whenever there was an option to buy one. In the meantime, my brother bought a kindle and was using it infrequently, so most of the times it was lying around unused. I thought of reading some financial books from kindle; by this time I was under the assumption that my Wink was done with and thought that five years (2010-2015) time in idle must have rendered the ereader unusable. I managed to read three books on kindle. This time I adapted to the ereader much better; either the alarming rate at which I was hoarding books or the ability to read at lesser price compared to the physical books made me lean towards kindle.
Now, all I had to do is, buy myself a kindle. But my mind was bothered with the thought of Wink. I wanted to confirm that it is indeed realy dead before venturing to buy a kindle. A bit of search and I found the old Wink. The search for the charging cable took longer, but I eventually found it. Plugged the Wink to charger and voila! it started charging. I was surprised at the resiliency of that thing. After a full charge I downloaded EPUB versions of various books that I always wanted to read and started reading them.
While reading, I noticed some differences between Wink and kindle; ofcourse kindle is much more advanced in terms of features, has touchscreen, can browse the footnotes, can see the meaning for words, etc,. But Wink was pretty simple and doesn't interfer in reading with any distraction. Kindle with its touchscreen, it gets annoying when we touch it unbeknowst to us and something turns up on the screen, making us spend some time in rectifying it. Wink has two buttons on the vertical side panel to turn the pages back and forth; it is easy to use and unintruding in nature. Purists will love reading on Wink more than on kindle.
It's a shame that kindle monopolised the ereader market, which means the goodness of other ereaders like Wink has gone extinct. There are other ereaders like Kobo, but they are rather expensive and cannot campare with kindle when it comes to marker presence. The more I read on Wink, the more I love it. Only for as long as the device remains useable, after which I have to buy a kindle!
