Tag: reading

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Despite, or perhaps because of it being a crappy year, last year was very much a year of reading. I enjoyed just over 80 books. And as a bonus almost nothing of my spending on reading went to Bezos’ Amazon. Dropping Amazon meant some reorganisation of maintaining my ebooks collection, and a rebalancing of how I acquire books in general.

At the start of 2025 I stepped away from Amazon for purchasing (e-)books. What looked hard at the outset, like it did when I quit Gmail in 2014, turned out to be much easier than anticipated. It does require shifting your attention to other things. There is more friction compared to when you live your entire bookish habit in a silo. In return I experienced a much bigger sense of wonder and exploration, which I realised is way more important to me. Additionally, it brought the way I experience my book store browsing and my online book browsing much closer together. That was unexpected but a big benefit.

The Numbers

I read just over 80 books, mostly fiction, a dozen non-fiction. Originally I had hoped, as I’ve hoped for years, to read more non-fiction, but on average one per month is not bad in comparison to previous years, and certainly not given the year it was and the amount of bandwidth I had for new input.

During the last year I acquired 128 books. Of those 48 were paper books, and 82 e-books (meaning I added 2 titles in both digital and paper version). Of the 48 paper books, 22 were fiction and 26 non-fiction. The 82 e-books were exactly half fiction and non-fiction.

I read fiction in the evenings, at least half an hour before I fall asleep but usually more. One or two books per week, depending on their length and time available, is the average, and has been for a number of years.

Amazon silo quit

At the start of last year I decided to leave Amazon, and get my books elsewhere. Originally when I started buying books with Amazon, it was because they were basically the only reliable online source for new English language publications, and especially for Science Fiction. My first order of paper books was in February 2008, my first e-book order with Amazon was in December 2010. From 2015 on the Dutch Amazon store exists, before 2015 I used the US store, and also regularly the German and UK store. Most paper books I buy come from local bookstores, but e-books I bought almost exclusively from Amazon.

After my decision early 2025 I did not buy anything at Amazon anymore. Except one paper book, from a used bookstore in the USA, that was delivered through Amazon fulfillment, as I found out when the parcel arrived with their logo on it.

Once I realised that what 15 years ago was a rare convenience, can now be fulfilled by many others, it was easy to quit. It did involve some work though. What helps is that, while Amazon has its own e-book format for Kindle, the rest of the world uses one single other format, epub. So, next to Amazon there are many options.

Leaving Amazon meant two things:
1) creating my own environment to manage my e-books, including ones I already have. Calibre is my go to tool now. For each book, including all the paper ones, I also have a note in my notes tool. I brought my Kindle e-books over to Calibre too. All new e-books go into Calibre, sometimes with the help of the tool Epubor. When I select a book to read and load onto my reader, I now start in my notes to see what I have, and then Calibre to get the book.
2) find new ways to acquire e-books. These days many more platforms and book stores sell e-books online. In the Netherlands, across the EU and elsewhere. For most English language e-books the Kobo platform is useful.

I use a Kobo reader and an Android e-ink device to read.

Nature outside the Walled Garden

Cutting my own path created more friction at first. Most of that however is a one-time thing to figure out and set up. For every online platform and book store you need to find out which e-books have watermarks, which have DRM, plus which type (Adobe, lcpl, or something else), and if you can handle that. Each and every platform comes with its own account to keep track of too. The book sector pretends there is no single European market, but 27 separate markets. In part that is because of differences in how prices are set at national level. In part that is because e-books are electronic services in the single market, and the VAT of the customer’s country of residence applies. When I buy an e-book in Belgium or Cyprus, I will pay the Dutch VAT rate. It seems many platforms avoid the admin of dealing with different VAT rates by only selling domestically. You get around that by lying about your address. A bit like back when you had to fill out US zip codes on various sites and everyone used 90210 as it was the only one everyone knew by heart from the 90s tv series.

Frequenting different online book platforms brings a bigger sense of wonder and exploration in return on that initial friction. While the Japanese, Ireland registered, Kobo platform is most like Amazon in that it has ‘everything’, I’ve bought on a range of different platforms this year. Each platform, especially if they have a specific niche, or if they are tied to a physical book store, has its own flavour, and shows different books on its front page or in the context of the book I am searching for.
Some of the books that serendipity brings in front of my eyes that way are in languages I can’t read, but it does mean I know it exists, and may find a translation somewhere.
Especially since I read Libraries of the Mind by William Marx (see below) I’ve come to see translation also as obscuring the untranslated, and I am more on the lookout for other languages just out of curiosity as to their existence.

In the past I felt a big divide between exploring physical bookshops and buying an e-book (on Amazon), and there was always some guilt involved in coming across a book in a store and then later buying an e-book. This has changed.

Yes, I buy at the generic Kobo platform (although the sales accrue with the big Dutch Bol platform), but there are plenty bookstores who have their own online platforms for e-books. When I was working in Berlin for a week in October, I browsed the Dussmann book store, taking notes and pictures of books I thought might be interesting. I didn’t buy anything, there are only so many books you can fit in carry-on luggage. Afterwards I check out the books in more detail online. I keep a list of things I’ve come across online and in stores that I may want to buy (also helpful to avoid buying a German edition of something I already have in English e.g.). I then buy the ones I want to have as e-book, at the store’s own online platform. It works as an extension of the experience of browsing the store, while transitioning from the physical to the e-book.
It brings browsing book stores and online together. That feeling persists across stores, where I jot down a title in one book store, see it someplace else and then buy it in yet another. It was an unexpected effect. Yet it makes the experience much more pleasant and continuous.

The books I most enjoyed in 2025

Out of the around 80 titles last year these are a few I enjoyed. Not a ranking, not a limitative list.

I came across the author Elif Shafak because of her discussing multilingualism in an article. Then I searched out her books.
There Are Rivers in the Sky I read first (which I bought for Kindle in late 2024), a beautifully written book of the past and the now. And later in the year The Island of Missing Trees (bought on Kobo), making the separation of Cyprus tangible. Beautiful language.

Playground by Richard Powers (Kobo via Bol.com), was a fun read. Life is the stories we carry and tell. This one builds an arc from oral cultures to statistically probable AI output, from friendship and turns not taken, to restoring our earth and oceans which technology has consumed. Beautifully woven and told. It also led me through references in the story about gaming and virtual words to reading Johan Huizinga’s 1938 work Homo Ludens.

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner (Kindle, bought December 2024), seemingly loosely inspired by the mathematician and later hermit Alexander Grothendiek. An agent provocateur for hire is tracking a group of activists in southern France. But this gig is changing her too. The weaving of different stories and layers, in social stratum, geography, mental health and alcohol abuse, and time was fun. A story I’d like to have continued reading.

Vor aller Augen by Martina Clavadetscher (paper, bought in Zürich), is a bundle of short stories centered around the women in famous paintings. Some were misses for me, some were full hits. Some felt too long, others felt too short and deserving of their own entire book.

Libraries of the Mind by William Marx, a professor of comparative literatures, was a fun and inspiring non-fiction read. It led me down the path of exploring non-fiction in languages I cannot read, and in general focus on reading as a path of exploration, not merely the act of reading a book. (paper, bought in Groningen)

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan I appreciated and enjoyed a lot more precisely because I read Libraries of the Mind by William Marx two months before it. A century from now two scholars of comparative literatures in a post-climate collapse England look back at our years to figure out if a famous poem that no-one ever saw or read, it was just read by the author to a group of people once at a birthday party, might still exist somewhere. While their students can hardly read and protest against having to read more than a handful of books during their entire education. Came across it in an Antwerp bookstore, but read it through the Kobo Plus subscription that E has.

Berghonger by Fleur Jongepier (non-fiction, paper, bought in Utrecht), I came across right after our return from a trip to the Alps this summer. The author, when not in the mountains, lives around the corner from our office in Utrecht.

Biedermann und die Brandstifter by Max Frisch (1953, e-book, bought online from a Vienna bookstore). Arsonists are wreaking havoc in town, Biedermann houses the arsonists in his attic after they wriggle their way into his life, in the vain hope they at least won’t burn his place down. Originally I read this in 1987, but since a number of years there are plenty arsonists on the move again, and getting re-elected. So a re-read was in order, and one of my first attempts to buy from bookstores online across Europe.

Rouwdouwers by Falun Ellie Koos, raw, sharp observations. While being very different I associate it with another book by Max Frisch, Homo Faber (1957), that as a teenager I read in one sitting more or less like a manual on how not to feel. I read this with a lot more compassion. Moving. (paper, bought in Utrecht)

Then we get to the SF / fantasy books, of which I will name five.

Extremophile by Ian Green (paper, bought in Utrecht), was a cool ride. Biohacking thriller set in climate-collapse London. Picked it up because it had an endorsement of Adrian Tchaikovsky, whose books I usually enjoy. This is Green’s first SF book after writing mostly fantasy. Very enjoyable.

Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky usually does some amazing world building in space opera settings. This is a more whimsical story in comparison, grim and fun all at the same time. (Bought for Kindle still in 2024.)

A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys, a first-contact story set in a near future hope punk world. The aliens distrust you if you don’t bring your kids to negotiations. Her site says she recently moved to the Netherlands. Bought as e-book through the Dutch Bol.com platform.

The Steerswoman by Rosemary Kirstein On recommendation by Cory Doctorow read this, and the three next volumes. A fantasy story that is also a terraforming and colonisation SF story. High-tech will look like magic to those not in the know. Two additional books have been announced. (read through the Kobo Plus subscription that E has)

Memory of Water by Emmi Itäranta, the 2014 debut novel of this Finnish author (e-book, through the Dutch Bol platform). Finland is very arid and part of a future-China occupation. Water crimes are punishable by death. Tea Masters have a special relationship to water. Strangely enjoyable mix of the stillness and quiet rituals of tea ceremonies with the tension of a brutal regime, while we follow a woman growing up and become herself.

I appreciate how 11 of the 13 living authors in this list have a personal website on the open web.

Looking forward to the stories that lie ahead in 2026!

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I want to find and learn about non-fiction books I cannot read.
Meaning I don’t have the languages for them.

One of the key aspects of Europe is that there are many languages. I since long believe that is a cultural and socio-economic strength and treasure. Article 3.3 of the EU Treaty and Article 22 of the EU Charter of Fundamental rights say the same thing: The Union shall respect […] linguistic diversity.

In practice people for their interaction often retreat to something overlapping, most often English.
Within the EU institutions 24 languages are in official use. Only a few of them are used as common overlap between participants. Online, globally, nothing is truly multilingual, it’s at most serial mono-lingual. Most people don’t even get to write their names properly online. (For fun I spelled my name on my website using the proper digraph ij and not ij, and my search ranking took an immediate tumble when I did.)

I read, speak and write three languages (Dutch, English, German), and can somewhat read and speak French, and can somewhat guess when reading a few more. Whenever I travel I visit bookstores, to look at what titles are available, ignoring if I could read them or not.
Of course non-fiction bestseller titles often overlap, having been translated from English usually. Other books on display are local.

Some works in other languages will be translated into others, and if that is English, German or Dutch, become accessible to me.
However, the side effect of that is that other works that are not translated become even less visible. If I count on the fact that the most relevant Polish, Swedish, or Greek works of this moment will be translated then it will reduce the probability I will go looking for something beyond that. And I won’t know if an absence of translated works means an actual absence of relevant material. Translation acts like a filter, made up of unknown curation terms. Everything else becomes ‘dark matter’ in the words of William Marx in Libraries of the Mind, outside that language.

In order to change that, at least personally, I want to add more non-fiction titles to my ‘library of the mind’, i.e. books and their core messages that I’m aware of.
With non-fiction you can get a lot from a book even if you cannot read the language. Content overview, index, illustrations and section titles already provide a good first approximation of what a book is positing, without the need of much translation or language.

So, when it is about technology, data, philosophy, futurism, communities, change, democracy, do tell me what books I should be aware of in your language. It would be great too if you can point me to online, local to you, retailers that may have it as e-book.


A bookshop in Seville, Spain (since closed). Photo Metro Centric CC BY.


A bookshop in Athens, Greece. Photo Luke McKernan CC BY SA


A bookshop in Caen, France. Photo TeaMeister CC BY

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This year I decided to no longer spend any money with Amazon. Over the years I’ve spent quite a bit at Amazon on mostly e-books, and some paper books.
I’m exploring other options of buying and acquiring ebooks. Today I decided to divert some of the money I would otherwise have spent at Amazon as donations to Standard Ebooks.

Standard Ebooks is a US based ‘low profit‘ organisation that creates ebooks from books that are (considered to be) in the public domain in the USA, and releases those ebooks into the public domain themselves.
It ensures works are available as ebook, also when there’s no commercial entity willing to market an ebook version.

Creativity builds on creativity, creators mutually influence each other across borders and across time. The public domain is a key societal boon. In my voluntary work for the Open Nederland association, the focus is on facilitating the use of Creative Commons licenses for makers in the Netherlands. Creative Commons allows you to set generic permissions for various types of use, thus allowing creative works to flow more easily, both to the public and to other makers.

Making public domain ebooks from public domain books is a similar act. It ensures that human creativity available in the public domain keeps growing, despite various publishing houses actively campaigning against it (or even aiming to limit library access to works).

Much better to spend money there than at Amazon.
I’m diverting about 25% of my previous Amazon spending to Standard Ebooks.

There are various kinds of RSS feeds that I can access as a patron, as well as an OPDS feed for their entire collection. Such an OPDS feed, like with podcasts, allows one to distribute books and book collections as feed payload. My Calibre library tool (as server) and various e-readers (as client) can work with such feeds.

There is one caveat: whether something is in or out of copyright, depends on your location as you download a work. Works can be in the public domain in e.g. the US, where Standard Ebooks is located, but still in copyright elsewhere and vice versa. Your location determines if you are breaching copyright when downloading a work.

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I’m trying to move away from buying Amazon e-books. I read quite a bit, 60-100 titles per year. Most of those in the past years have been e-books from Amazon (some 1000 titles in my Amazon collection). Ideally I want my spending at Amazon to end, because Amazon.

The question is, what are alternatives?
And how much friction will changing things introduce in both acquiring and reading books?

Like in any silo, inside it things are frictionless, and there is a hurdle to leaving. The hurdle here is to a large extend the sum of Amazon’s practices towards publishers plus how book publishing and selling are organised globally and the resulting lack of viable alternatives.

There is very little generic e-book publishing (meaning you’d own the title outright). Amazon ties it to Kindle, the two major book selling sites in the Netherlands each tie it to a different DRM-infested channel (Kobo/Rakuten and Adobe respectively). You’re licensing a copy, rather than owning it as they can withdraw access at any time. It also means if they go out of business or leave your local market you’re locked out of your purchases.
For most e-books you are tied to specific apps or devices with their specific stores. There is no meaningful separation between the medium file and the reading device, they are mostly a package deal.

Another Amazon lock-in effect results from price. I check all books with other vendors before buying. They practically never (as in maybe once in a year of reading) beat Amazon’s pricing. For paper books this holds too, as the Netherlands uses a fixed book sales price. This effect is specifically aimed for by Amazon.

Finally, Amazon often is the only source available to me for an e-book, especially when it comes to English language science fiction.

So the preferred conditions are:

  • e-books over paper books
  • no DRM for e-books
  • directly from author or publisher
  • wide ranges of books in multiple languages available
  • not needing several reading devices
  • from an independent bookstore (paper)

Over the years I have bought e-books directly from authors (like Cory Doctorow who wrote the posting about Amazon’s practices I linked to above), and independent publishers (like Verso in the UK, for which I currently have a subscription), both e-books and paper books. I prefer e-books, especially for fiction, as I read fiction every evening in bed. An e-book reader comes with its own light and is easy to hold while lying on my side.

Non-fiction I’m more ok with paper, although I enjoy immediate digital annotation in e-books too.
Not many authors provide direct sales through their site, let alone e-books, and the same is true for publishers.
I do frequent independent book stores regularly/mostly (both online and in physical stores), but that of course is for paper books.

For e-books there’s no DRM free route it seems, so it boils down to picking a different Dutch/European silo next to Amazon. This reduces part of my Amazon lock-in and spending, but leaves wide swathes of English publications unavailable to me if I would move silos entirely.
I can afford to escape Amazon’s price lock in, although it would probably double the cost or threefold of my reading for titles I buy, as I’ve regularly used the steep reductions Amazon uses to under 5USD. The local library is of no use for non-Dutch books, e- nor paper. I did get myself a university library subscription allowing easier access to paper academic books, and electronic journals, both categories outside of what I use Amazon for.

Next to moving sideways into a more local silo for e-books, an additional step I think is weaning myself from the instant gratification of buying an e-book. Coming across an inviting title, and immediately grabbing it on Amazon to add to the pile of books to be read is how it usually goes. Likely better to allow myself time to search the best route to get them. For non-fiction I have notes about books I think are interesting, but haven’t acquired yet. For fiction I until now merely do that for titles that have been announced but haven’t been published yet. Keeping a list may help reduce my Amazon spending.

In summary:

  • Start reading within the Dutch Kobo/Rakuten silo.
  • Keep a list of titles I’d like to acquire and explore at later moment the best way to doing that.

I’ve bought 7 titles this January through Amazon (16 last December). Let’s set myself a challenge of keeping that number from rising!

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I am currently reading Wayfinding by Michael Bond. I picked up a paper version of the book in a Utrecht bookstore two months ago, while browsing book shelves.

So far I find it fascinating, and I’ve been annotating quite a bit. For the next stage of working through those annotations I realised I might want to also buy the e-book version, so I can digitally connect source text and annotations together, lift out quotes etc.

Do you at times use the paper and e-version of the same book in parallel?

For this book I enjoy being able to easily inspect the structure and main topics, using the paper book. But lifting out the smaller parts that speak to me would be more easily done from the e-book.

Or perhaps I should do all that first by hand as I do normally, and only then start down the exploratory path I feel brewing behind what I’m reading and thinking. I’m not entirely sure what I’m after here, the ability to switch easier from analog to digital, to actually combine the prime affordances of both? Or is it seeking faster gratification from exploring notes, rather than first work through the source material?

The cost of course doubles more or less if you do this. So likely it only applies to books that trigger a more intensive engagement with their contents.

Bookmarked (Re)Introducing Readlists by Jim Nielsen

This is another good example to put on my list of ‘discontinued services that deserve to be re-created’, although not necessarily as a central tool and more like a personal tool that can network. Delicious, Dopplr are others that come to mind. Also relevant because, in terms of reading, pulling together a collection of web articles on the same topic and then reading and annotating them in one go, this might be more effective in terms of learning. Might give this a try with some already saved articles on one topic or other. (found via Frank Meeuwsen)

I found myself every few weeks thinking, “gosh, I wish that service was still up. I really need to make a readlist out these handful of articles.” … I finally asked myself: “well then why don’t you recreate it?”

Jim Nielsen