I’ve pretty much given up dead-tree media this year, with the exception of a couple of cheap second-hand books I picked up along the way and then ditched after reading, and an increasingly battered copy of The Bloomsday Book that should really be helping me to make good on my promise to myself of finally finishing Ulysses, rather than just sitting in the bottom of my bag making me feel guilty.

I have, however, read a lot of books this year, thanks mostly to Project Gutenberg and the Tor.com eBook Club. Less successful were Kindle Unlimited and Scribd. I was dubious about Kindle Unlimited as it doesn’t have a terribly wide selection available. It does have most of the Lonely Planet books, though, so that was enough to get me to sign up. It’s USD 9.99 per month, and that lets you “borrow” up to ten books at a time. Most of the fiction, though, is sadly lacking. There are a lot of long series (mostly science fiction, fantasy, or porn; occasionally more than one) where the first book has been put into the KU section in the hope that you’ll then pay for books 2-13 of The Unbelievably Badly-Written Chronicles. Some Kindle Singles (normally around $2-3 each for 20-30 minutes’ reading at my pace) are free, but only a few were worth reading. All the James Bond novels are available, but they really haven’t aged well, and made me angry. I unsubscribed a while ago, and now they’re trying to tempt me back by sending me emails offering Barbara Bush’s memoirs.

I’ve complained about how frustrating the experience of reading Lonely Planet books on a Kindle is elsewhere. That led me to Scribd, which has a similar subscription model, a smartphone app, and used to have all the Insight Guide travel books available. Alas, they took these away just a couple of months after I subscribed, so I stopped that too.

The one unqualified success this year has been Netflix. As well as making a lot of very watchable things, they do rather well at making it watchable on pretty bad Internet connections.