From the Boox Palma to the Light Phone 2, it seems 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 and mindlessly scroll, I know my time could be put to better use. But as the owner of many nifty gadgets, I also didn’t want to have another device in my life, so I was very excited to stumble upon a partial solution for the gadgets I already had: the Playdate.
Yes, I’m talking about that little yellow console from Panic and Teenage Engineering that has a crank on the side. Since the introduction of the on-device store Catalog, the handheld has become a place for a variety of experiences. I’ve been playing small city builders, dungeon crawlers, and egg bumpers. Even so, I was surprised to find Playbook, a full-fledged e-reading app. Perhaps even more surprising is that it actually works quite well.
The app comes pre-installed with some classic books and I initially tested it by reading most of the classic books Frankenstein. The Playdate’s black-and-white LCD screen is great for displaying text and displays clearly. The disadvantage is that there is no backlight, suitable for night reading, and the screen is small. At one point, a quote from Mary Shelley took up the entire monitor.
But, like the device itself, the app is also quite charming. You scroll through books using the crank, which is weird but tactilely fun (you can also use the D-pad instead). Instead of telling you what percentage of the book you’ve read or how much time is left, Playbook has a candle as a progress bar that slowly burns as you read. It’s less scientific, but more comfortable, with the flames flickering every now and then.
There are some features missing – you can’t jump around in the book without scrolling, for example, and you can’t highlight passages – but the biggest hurdle may just be getting the book onto your Playdate. It’s not as simple as syncing your Kindle library. Instead, you have to connect your handheld to your computer, put it into USB mode, and then drag and drop files into the correct folder. Before this, you had to convert .epub files to .txt, which was relatively painless.
To test this, I grabbed a bunch of e-books from Project Gutenberg, including Dracula, The Fall of the House of Usherand rotation of screw. (In retrospect, my choice may have been influenced by the idea of reading by virtual candlelight.) Everything I added to the app worked well, except The Complete Works of William Shakespearewhich caused my Playdate to crash every time I tried to open it, presumably because it was too large.
Now let’s face it: The $5 Playdate app isn’t going to be your one-stop solution for reading more. This isn’t for me. I still have a Kindle on my nightstand and carry the paperback with me wherever I go. But just as the Playdate serves a complementary purpose and the unique games it offers aren’t meant to replace the Switch or PlayStation, the same goes for the Playbook.
This app is not my primary reading tool. But it works well enough and – most importantly – is convenient enough that it’s great to have around in a pinch. Having a library of classic novels on a credit card sized device would be handy—and, if nothing else, it would help me avoid buying other gadgets.
