Like most travellers I try to keep the number of items I pack to an absolute minimum. For many years finding room to pack the books I planned to read was a major problem… one I often ended up “solving” by buying books as needed at inflated prices at the airport news stands. Then, along came the Kindle, et al… OK except it was one more device (and charger, etc.) to pack. Kindle for PC was great except that it wasn’t available for linux, and it didn’t run well on Wine, so I ended up booting into XP just to read books. Not only was that horribly inconvenient, it also tied a lot of disk space for the extra OS.
Every few months I’d check to see if a Linux version had become available, and this morning I finally saw an answer. At read.amazon.com there’s now a browser based version that runs on either Chrome or Firefox. I’ve just loaded it on Chrome… not bad at all. It stores the books “on the Cloud” (why do we need another way to say “on-line”?) but also offers the option to store materially locally, so I can read off-line too.