Why I Still Carry Paperbacks Instead of a Tablet

I want to say up front that this isn’t really an argument against tablets or ereaders on the merits, I know the space argument, I know the backlight-for-reading-in-a-dark-room argument, I’ve heard all of it from Reyes more than once on a long drive. I own one. It’s a good one. It’s currently in a kitchen drawer back in Tulsa, and the reason it’s there instead of in my travel case comes down to one specific night in a motel outside a plant in west Texas, a couple years back, that I still bring up more than the story probably deserves.

I’d finished a service call late, checked in exhausted, plugged the tablet in to charge overnight the way I always did, and woke up to find the outlet by the bed was dead, some wiring issue with the room that the front desk apologized for but couldn’t fix until maintenance came by later that morning. Tablet at four percent. No charger that worked in any other outlet I could find. I had an early call the next town over and nothing to read on a two hour drive where I wasn’t the one driving, Reyes had that leg, and I sat in the passenger seat with a genuinely dead screen and nothing to do but stare at the highway.

That’s a small thing to build a whole reading habit around, I know. But it stuck, in the specific way a minor inconvenience sometimes reorganizes a bigger decision without you fully deciding it on purpose. A paperback doesn’t have a battery that can quietly run its course overnight in a room with bad wiring. It doesn’t need a charger I might not have packed, or an outlet that isn’t already claimed by a CPAP machine or a phone or the lamp. It just works, every time, in every room, whether the power in that particular motel is behaving itself or not.

I’ll grant the real cost, a stack of paperbacks takes up more room in the case than a tablet ever would, and I’ve had to get genuinely disciplined about only carrying one book at a time instead of the three or four I’d like. But the reliability trade has been worth it for me, every single time, in a life where so much of the job already depends on machines behaving the way they’re supposed to. The one thing I get to carry that doesn’t need power, doesn’t need a signal, doesn’t need anything from me except a page turned every few minutes, is the one thing I’ve decided I don’t want to complicate. The tablet stays in the drawer. It’s a good drawer.