E-Readers on the Trail

If you're an avid reader like me, having reading material on a backpack trip, especially a solo trip, is an essential. You know you're in trouble after you zip through that paperback book you brought on the first two nights of the trip and then find your self reading food packages and tea labels over and over.

My traditional solution was to bring a book that fell short of being a page turner so I wouldn;t be tempted to stay up until the wee hours reading. Like the time a couple of friends and I were camped on the first day of a week in the Sn Juan Mountains of southwest Colorado. The weather was fine so we just laid out our bags on our unpitched tents and slept under the stars. Well, one of us sleep. At midnight Larry was snoring away but I was still reading by headlamp. A pool of light next to Larry gave away the fact that his wife, Sherry, was still reading too. I switched off then and sacked out but in the morning the horrible truth emerged- Sherry had finished her book. On the first night.

When PDA's came out I did some reading on my Palm Pilot but the screen was tiny, the type coarse, the battery life limited, the book selection very limited, and the eyestrain immense. Later PDA's improved, but not enough. To fair, they weren't designed as book readers.

So I followed the release of the original Amazon Kindle with interested, but it soon became apparent that the first generation had problems that needed to be addressed. Of course Amazon did that and any Kindle from the Kindle 2 onward makes a great wilderness e-reader.

Of the current crop, the lightest and cheapest is the Kindle basic with special offers. At 6.0 ounces or 170 grams it is lighter than a paperback and holds approximately 1,500 books. Even Sherry couldn't read that many books on a hiking trip. Amazon claims a month of battery life based on half an hour a day with wireless turned off. For a week hiking trip, that works out to 2 hours of reading per day.

For more battery life with just lightly more weight, the Kindle Touch starts at $99, weighs 7.5 ounces or 213 grams, and has double the battery life. For me the Touch is pretty much the ideal e-book reader.

Avoid the Kindle Fire or any other tablet computer for backcountry reading. They are too heavy, the battery life is only 8-10 hours, and the screen is unreadable in bright light.

Note that to get long battery life wireless must be off- in the backcountry you're not going to have a WiFi signal anyway. If you have a 3G Kindle Touch, and you're in an area with 3G service, turn wireless on only when you need it.

My use of the various Kindles pretty much verifies that battery life is close to what Amazon claims, but I'm going to run a real-world test. Unfortunately I can't go on a long backpack trip right now because of a looming book deadline (yes, I have to write about hiking rather than doing it.) So instead I just started a test with my Kindle Touch. It's a month old, so the battery should be close to its original capacity. Starting from a full charge today, I'll read with the wireless turned off and keep a log of my reading until the battery runs down.

When that happens I'll report back and also review some Kindle accessories that are useful in the wilderness.