Of Kindle, Instapaper and Thesis-ing

Two months ago, I started writing my thesis. I finally handed it in last week. During that time, I was pretty much non-existent online. I did not blog for instance! My virtual alter-ego was on hiatus. Well, you can't really blame him, real-life me was thesis-ing after all. See, the things people say about thesis-ing are true: it's at times nerve-wracking, at other times fabulously engrossing. Its progress is directly related to caffeine consumption and number of papers read and indirectly related to number of emails your supervisor sends you. And of course, it's time-consuming. So, it might be utterly bewildering to some to learn that I bought a Kindle during this hectic period.

But it is in those times of academic pressure that my mind fantasizes on non-academic things. I want to get back writing that novel; I desperately want to go to the movies (to watch Green Lantern, dear god); I want to visit the Melbourne Museum. And I want a Kindle to read books (or rather, ebooks). I suppose this is my brain's way of protecting itself from thesis-ing overload-try to force any thoughts of it out of the fun region of my brain. The hard part is to not act on these urges. I succeeded for most part but I couldn't resist not purchasing a Kindle.

I had decided to buy one for a while but my much more sensible pre-thesis me figured he would wait until the holidays to do so. My thesis-ing self had to deal with a wandering mind though and gave in around a month into thesis-ing, a full month before the holidays. Probably not the best of timings. So the Kindle arrived one morning, forcing me to buy an ebook. Dear readers, you would perhaps think that I bought a relatively short ebook, considering the circumstances. Well... I purchased the first four books of George R.R. Martin's best-selling epic series, "A Song of Ice and Fire". An equivalent of 3880 hard-copy pages on my Kindle when I was supposed to be thesis-ing. In my defense, I bought the four-in-one edition which costs less than buying the four books separately.

And so I started reading A Game of Thrones, the first book of the series. I am not lying however when I say that it did not hinder my thesis-ing. On the contrary, reading (or should I say Kindle-ing) was a good hobby which prevented me from going in a state of stupor or resignation during thesis-ing. But reading on the Kindle was not only hobby.

Another major advantage of getting a Kindle was that the number of papers I was able to read increased substantially in comparison to my ancient pre-Kindle years. There are two main problems with reading papers on a computer. Firstly, the screen is backlit (it emits light) and this tires my eyes. (The Kindle on the other hand uses eInk technology-and is not backlit-giving the screen the feel of reading a paper book.) However, ophthalmologists say there isn't really much of a difference between how the eye works with either eInk or backlit screens, as reported in a Wall Street Journal article. Secondly, a computer is connected to the Internet, ergo to the world, so distractions are aplenty. On my Kindle however, I was able to read papers all relaxed and everything and was free from Facebook! I still had to arm myself with cups of coffee though.

PDFs do not work great on Kindles and this initially was a cause of concern for me. I like reading PDF versions of papers. The Kindle screen however, is too small so you have to zoom in (and thus scroll a lot) to be able to read PDFs. But I worked out another way to read papers on my Kindle: Instapaper.

Instapaper is this nifty app which became popular on the iPhone and iPad. It lets you bookmark articles and gives you the option to read a text-only version, ideal for mobile devices and tablets. Instapaper also has a Kindle app which I downloaded and installed on my Kindle. After that, all I had to do was to bookmark full-text versions of papers, update my Instapaper list of bookmarks on my Kindle and next thing you know, I was reading "Neurovascular regulation in the normal brain and in Alzheimer's disease", a 14-page review paper, on my slick eye-friendly eInk-display screen! Oh yeah.

Now that I'm done with thesis-ing, my Kindle is paper-free territory, at least for the time being. But what I feared would have been a source of distraction and procrastination became a superb educational tool instead. Oh, and did I mention that the Kindle is affordable, even for us, students?

Now back to A Game of Thrones.