A couple of years ago, around this time, I upgraded to the best reading experience I could afford at the time. I got me a Kindle Oasis.

I called it my Hole Hawg. And boy, has it served me like one.
And while it has done, everything it promised it would do, I found myself outgrowing it and needing something more powerful.

What I need

• A device that could handle nearly every format that I could throw at it.
• Something that was not beholden to the Bezos beast.¹
• While I love the Oasis’ speed, I want something faster.
• Something that would let me read PDF files, without making want to scratch my eyeballs out.
• A large screen, because PDFs and because I am getting old and blind as a bat.
• While also doing everything else that the Oasis did with the same aplomb
• Bonus: Being able to read comics.

A little bit of research led me to the Kobo Elipsa 2e.
It isn’t sold here in India, so a kind cousin got it for me. It has a pen and it marks up books and all that jazz, but I don’t know how much I will use that feature. What I need is what I wrote above and the Elipsa does it all. Very, very, well.

The screen is a lower ppi than the Oasis (227 vs 300), but the screen is large and I hold it farther away from my face, to notice any difference. I can also turn off that crazy Kindle full justification, to have my beloved ragged right. It’s extremely responsive, flipping orientation without that heartbeat of a pause, I would have with the Oasis.

I ran out of space on the 8gb Paperwhite and so grudgingly went and paid extra for a 32gb Kindle Oasis. This was before a friend pointed out that even the Paperwhite now has a 32gb variant.

Now what?

I decided to use the Oasis, so that I could lay my hands on the best e-ink reader Amazon makes for a week and then exchange it for a new Paperwhite.

I got it.
I used it.
And decided within a day, that I was not going back to a Paperwhite, ever.
I realised that the Oasis, to me, is not a “premium” device.

What it is, is a Hole Hawg …

Neal Stephenson writes …

The Hole Hawg is a drill made by the Milwaukee Tool Company. If you look in a typical hardware store you may find smaller Milwaukee drills but not the Hole Hawg, which is too powerful and too expensive for homeowners.
The Hole Hawg does not have the pistol-like design of a cheap homeowner’s drill. It is a cube of solid metal with a handle sticking out of one face and a chuck mounted in another. The cube contains a disconcertingly potent electric motor. You can hold the handle and operate the trigger with your index finger, but unless you are exceptionally strong you cannot control the weight of the Hole Hawg with one hand; it is a two-hander all the way. In order to fight off the counter-torque of the Hole Hawg you use a separate handle (provided), which you screw into one side of the iron cube or the other depending on whether you are using your left or right hand to operate the trigger. This handle is not a sleek, ergonomically designed item as it would be in a homeowner’s drill. It is simply a foot-long chunk of regular galvanized pipe, threaded on one end, with a black rubber handle on the other.

The Oasis is my Hole Hawg for reading.
It is lopsided, but it helps me hold it better and for longer.
It is extremely responsive.
It is much, much, much faster than any e-reader I have owned.
The glass screen is much better than plastic, both to see and to use.
Touching, swiping, highlighting, shuffling books, file transfers … it handled everything I threw at it without breaking a sweat.

If you read as much as I do, the Hole Hawg Kindle Oasis, is a worthy investment.

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