An old acquaintance recently wrote about his experience with reading comics on the Nexus 7, the new 7″ tablet from Google and Asus. There was some discussion of the topic, and I bought a number of cheap comics to read on my own Galaxy Tab 7.7, which has the same screen resolution and only marginally larger screen.

The result is quite readable as long as I read a single page at a time. It has a problem with double pages – I have to zoom in and drag the picture to see all in a readable size. This is easy to do, but it does break the flow a little.

I kind of wish this technology had existed back in the time when I bought several times my own weight in comic books, back in the original Chaos Node. While I was never one of the true obsessed collectors – I just enjoyed reading the comics – there were many, many bags of comics that I carted off to the used-book store when I moved from there. And still there were several crates left. And when I moved again, I got rid of some more. And again. Now I have one cardboard crate worth of physical comics left, and if I live to move another time, there will probably be only a dozen books or so left.

If I had this technology, I could balance all those hundreds and hundreds of comics on two fingers. It would not have impacted moving at all, would not have taken up valuable space in my apartment. But on the other hand, I would not have been able to give them away and hope that some curious kid could enjoy them after me. So I guess all things have their price.

Speaking of price, even though I did not buy the newest comics (which are more expensive) and even bought some on sale, I just don’t find comic books worth paying for anymore. Well, obviously I did pay for them, but I bought them under doubt. I have more entertainment than I need. I don’t have unlimited time. To pay money to waste my time … well, I don’t feel like I need another way to do that right now. That part of my life is fading, like other parts have done before. I don’t really expect it to come back.

But there are worse things young people can do than read comics.  And there are worse ways to read them than on a 7″ tablet.

I bought mine from Comixology, which has an app that let me both buy them and display them. I can read them on several different devices at no extra cost. There are surely other ways as well, but I am not really going to study it any further than this, I think.