Once upon a time  the only ones glued to their phone screens in public were spotty teenagers playing snake. I suppose I got a glimpse of the future on the Tokyo subway a while ago with everyone glued to their screens reading the news (I presume, it was all in Japanese).

Recently I’ve been reading a lot of blog posts on my phone through the gReader app. Even in short journeys I can knock off a couple of posts, and it feels like I’m actually participating in things as they happen. (I’m aware that this is an illusion, but it is one that I’m happy to maintain.)

So the phone screen is a good place for short form essays and journalism, and at fist blush it seems that it works for long form too. I’ve been reading Gulliver’s travels through the Kindle app, which has actually been surprisingly easy. The screen makes the columns a good width for reading fast, and the page turns are easier than turning an actual page. This means that I can put the phone on a table, hold my head in one hand, a cup of tea in the other, and read.

The ability to condense a library of books into one small space is pretty cool, as is the ability to look stuff up in a dictionary or on Wikipedia. I’m not wild about having to buy books that I already own so that I can read them this way, it seems that the payment for the IP has already been made, and that the actual cost of providing the content must tend towards zero. However there are so many free classics available that it will probably be a while before I’m hooked enough to fork over any actual money.

I’ll update in a while about what I thought of the experience, but I don’t think that it’ll be too much of a competitor to ‘real’ books in the near future, but in the longer term, probably!