{"id":20520,"date":"2026-06-10T09:01:38","date_gmt":"2026-06-10T16:01:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/?p=20520"},"modified":"2026-06-10T09:01:40","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T16:01:40","slug":"getting-to-know-my-boox","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/getting-to-know-my-boox\/","title":{"rendered":"Getting to know my BOOX"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

For a long time I’ve been trying to practice a kind of harm reduction to my addiction to digital devices. I love reading, books most of all, but when I’m travelling or when I just HAVE to get a hold of something that would otherwise take a while to arrive in physical form, ereaders are the way to go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problems are of course increasingly down to both eshittification and the dopamine hits that come from how our digital devices lock our attention. Enshittification means that our devices are tied to a seller – be it Kobo, Kindle, Apple Books or whatever – and DRM locks means we cannot transfer material to a better reading device. Getting myself off Amazon has been a challenge because the kindle really is a great device. (Ton’s posts inspired me<\/a>) And my subscription to things like BookBub<\/a> means I have a bunch of books on my kindle that I want to read and for which I paid a couple of dollars. I don’t want to lose those. Kobo seems like the easy answer, but again, won’t let me read kindle ebooks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The obvious answer is to read on my phone or buy a tablet that can download apps. But that’s another problem. As I’m trying to manage my sleep better, blue light screens at night are not a good idea. Over many months I can see on my Apple Health app how blue light has affected my sleep if I use my phone within a half hour of bed. Reading on the phone is no good. And an iPad is just one more computer that I don;t need, with less utility than my MacBook, with all the toxic attractor basins of a connected device and with a poor reading experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so ChatGPT and I launched into a small research project to find a device that reads like a kindle, allow me to install apps and read from them and tightly constraints its access to the web. After reading some Reddit threads and fitting some ideas to my constraint regime, I decided to order a BOOX Go 7<\/a>. This is an android device – the first I have ever owned – and it allows me to load my kindle library, my Kobo library and the Libby app (which I use for library books and magazines like the New Yorker, Harper’s, Poetry and The Paris Review). It also allows me to sideload books which means I can download epub files and pdfs from places like The Internet Archive, Project Gutenberg and so on and easily transfer them to the device. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it was the cheapest device of all the options I looked at, coming in at a little over $270.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s all set up now and it was helpful to have ChatGPT accompany me as I learned the ins and outs of the device. Nearly every question I had got answered by the LLM which was great. It’s a whole other world learning a Chinese-designed android device that is neither a phone or a kindle, but so far I’m there, and I like it and it feels good to have my library in my hands again in a way that means I can lie in a hammock with my phone in the house and spend the summer free of distractions. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For a long time I’ve been trying to practice a kind of harm reduction to my addiction to digital devices. I love reading, books most of all, but when I’m travelling or when I just HAVE to get a hold of something that would otherwise take a while to arrive in physical form, ereaders are the way to go. The problems are of course increasingly down to both eshittification and the dopamine hits that come from how our digital devices lock our attention. Enshittification means that our devices are tied to a seller – be it Kobo, Kindle, Apple Books …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Getting to know my new BOOX Go 7","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2-2-2-2-2-2-2-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/piBp1-5kY","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20520"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20520\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20521,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20520\/revisions\/20521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chriscorrigan.com\/parkinglot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}