This Tiny E-Reader Is the Single Best Piece of Technology in Years
No matter how you read it, The Power Broker is a serious undertaking.
The paperback weighs as much as a brick; to avoid lugging around all 1,344 pages, people have cut it apart at the spine and chunked it into sections.
Others have organized in-person Power Broker marathon readings that run continuously for three full days.
I decided to try something else.
Over the past several weeks, I’ve spent 10 hours paging through Robert Caro’s masterpiece on an e-reader the size of a credit card.
It’s magnetic, and small enough to attach to the back of my iPhone without adding any real bulk to my pocket. (Yes, this does mean that I have a screen on the back of another screen.) It’s called the Xteink X3, and at a glance, it looks like a cheap gimmick: more electronic junk made by unknown brands and sold on Temu and TikTok Shop—the kind of thing influencers are always hawking. (Can I interest you in a programmable LED hat for $11.60? Or how about $20 AirPod look-alikes made by “Fhumsh”?) In a sense, it is that.
Xteink sounds less like a real brand name than the kind of garbled text you’ll find in AI-slop memes. (Speaking of which, the official website of the China-based company is full of AI-generated photos of people posing with the device.) And indeed, since the X3’s release on Amazon in May, TikTokers and YouTubers have raved about how the device is a steal and you should buy it right now—just click the link in bio. [ From our August 2026 issue: The end of reading is here ] And so I did.
On Amazon, the X3 is $69 and tops the “hot new releases” list for e-readers, beating out a slew of Kindles.
In person, the Xteink is many things: plasticky.
Flawed.
Finicky.
Nevertheless, it is the single best piece of technology that I have purchased in years.
In the two months before getting this cartoonishly tiny e-reader, I finished only one book.
In one month with the X3, I read three books without even really trying—and my iPhone’s average daily screen time dipped by 25 minutes.
5News aggregated this summary from the outlet’s public feed. The full article, with all the context, is on www.theatlantic.com — the content belongs to The Atlantic.
