The Playdate makes a surprisingly good e-reader

From the Boox Palma to the Gentle Cellphone 2, it appears that evidently everyone seems to be searching for distraction-free studying, if solely they’d the appropriate machine. I don’t blame them: each time I pull out my telephone to mindlessly scroll, I do know my time might be put to higher use. However because the proprietor of many nice devices, I additionally don’t actually need one other machine in my life, so I used to be fairly excited to bump into a partial resolution with a gadget I have already got: the Playdate.

Sure, I’m speaking about that little yellow Recreation Boy from Panic and Teenage Engineering, the one with a crank jutting out of its facet. Because the launch of its on-device retailer, Catalog, the hand-held has develop into dwelling to fairly a variety of experiences. I’ve been enjoying tiny metropolis builders and dungeon crawlers and egg touchers. Even nonetheless, I used to be stunned to find Playbook, a full-fledged e-reading app. Maybe much more stunning is that it truly works fairly nicely.

The app comes with a handful of basic books preinstalled, and I examined it initially by studying via most of Frankenstein. The Playdate’s black-and-white LCD display is fairly nice for displaying textual content, which reveals up crisp and clear. The downside is that it has no backlight for studying at night time, and the display is tiny. At one level, a single one among Mary Shelley’s sentences took up the whole show.

However, just like the machine itself, the app can also be very charming. You’ll be able to scroll via books utilizing the crank, which is bizarre however enjoyable in a tactile method (you can too use the D-pad as a substitute). And as a substitute of telling you what proportion of the e book you’ve learn or how a lot time you’ve got left, Playbook has a candle that serves as a progress bar, slowly burning down as you learn. It’s much less scientific, however way more cozy, with the flame flickering once in a while.

There are lacking options — there’s no strategy to bounce round in a e book with out scrolling, as an illustration, and you may’t spotlight passages — however the greatest hurdle may simply be getting books onto your Playdate. It’s not so simple as syncing your Kindle library. As a substitute, you need to join your handheld to a pc, put it in USB mode, after which drag and drop recordsdata into the appropriate folder. Earlier than that, you need to convert .epub recordsdata to .txt, which is comparatively painless.

To check this, I grabbed a bunch of ebooks from Mission Gutenberg, together with Dracula, The Fall of the Home of Usher, and The Turning of the Screw. (On reflection, my selections could have been influenced by the thought of studying by digital candlelight.) Every little thing I added to the app labored simply nice, aside from The Full Works of William Shakespeare, which prompted my Playdate to crash each time I attempted to open it, presumably as a result of it’s so massive.

Now let’s be actual: a $5 Playdate app just isn’t going to be your one-stop resolution for studying extra. It hasn’t been for me. I nonetheless hold a Kindle on my bedside desk and carry paperbacks wherever I am going. However simply because the Playdate serves a complementary function, providing distinctive video games that aren’t meant to interchange a Change or PlayStation, so, too, does Playbook.

The app isn’t my primary instrument for studying. Nevertheless it works nicely sufficient and — crucially — is handy sufficient that it’s nice to have round in a pinch. Having a library of basic novels on a tool the dimensions of a bank card turns out to be useful — and, if nothing else, it’s serving to hold me from shopping for one other gadget.