From the Boox Palma to the Light Phone 2, it seems like everyone is looking for distraction-free reading, as long as they have the right device. I don’t blame them: every time I pull out my phone to mindlessly browse, I know I could be putting my time to better use. But since I own a lot of great devices, I also don’t want another device in my life, so I was pretty excited to find a partial solution with a device I already own: the Playdate.
Yes, I'm talking about that little yellow Game Boy from Panic and Teenage Engineering, the one with a crank sticking out of the side. Since the launch of its on-device store, Catalog, the handheld console has become home to a wide range of experiences. I've been playing with little consoles city builders and Dungeon Explorers and Egg toppersStill, I was surprised to discover Strategy manuala full-featured e-reading app. Perhaps most surprisingly, it actually works pretty well.
The app comes with a handful of classic books pre-installed and I initially tested it out by reading most of them. FrankensteinThe Playdate's black-and-white LCD screen is pretty good at displaying text, which looks crisp and clear. The downside is that it has no backlight for reading at night, and the screen is tiny. At one point, a single sentence from Mary Shelley took up the entire screen.
But, like the device itself, the app is also very charming. You can scroll through books using the crank, which is weird but fun in a tactile way (you can also use the D-pad instead). And instead of telling you what percentage of the book you've read or how much time you have left, Playbook has a candle that serves as a progress bar, which slowly burns down as you read. It's less scientific, but much more cozy, with the flame flickering from time to time.
There are some missing features (for example, there's no way to jump between books without scrolling, and you can't highlight passages), but the biggest hurdle may be simply uploading books to Playdate. It's not as simple as syncing your Kindle library. Instead, you have to plug the handheld into a computer, put it into USB mode, and then drag and drop files into the right folder. Before that, you have to convert .epub files to .txt, which is relatively easy.
To test this, I grabbed a bunch of e-books from Project Gutenbergincluding Dracula, The Fall of the House of Usherand The turn of the screw(In retrospect, my choices may have been influenced by the idea of reading by virtual candlelight.) Everything I added to the app worked well, with the exception of The complete works of William Shakespearewhich caused my Playdate to crash every time I tried to open it, probably because it's so big.
Let's face it: a $5 Playdate app isn't going to be the one-stop solution to reading more. It hasn't been for me. I still have a Kindle on my nightstand and I carry paperback books wherever I goBut just as Playdate serves a complementary function, offering unique games that aren't meant to replace a Switch or PlayStation, so does Playbook.
The app isn't my primary reading tool, but it works pretty well and, more importantly, it's handy enough to have on hand in case of need. Having a library of classic novels on a credit card-sized device is very useful and, at the very least, helps me avoid buying another device.
