Two Ways to Read

The first required reading for my master’s is a book I already own. From Reliable Sources: An Introduction to Historical Methods, by Martha Howell and Walter Prevenier. Good book, useful book, and the print is small enough that twenty minutes with it is work for my old ass eyes. There’s an obvious fix for that. I own a Kindle. On the Kindle I make the type bigger and the problem goes away. Except there’s no Kindle edition of the Howell, at least not in Amazon’s store, and that’s the only store the device really wants to talk to. There may be an ebook out there somewhere. Getting it onto a device built to sell me Amazon’s copy is a project, and usually a more expensive one. Graduate reading lists are already expensive. I’m not adding a surcharge for the privilege of reading in a font I can see. So I sat with that for a few days, mildly annoyed, and then realized the annoyance was pointing at something else. Because even if the ebook existed, it wouldn’t have solved the problem. It…