One of the things that was frustrating to me in the beginning of my stay in Bali, was the low selection of books available in Bali. There are two main book stores here in Bali, Periplus which features the broadest selection of English language literature and Gramedia which mostly sells books written in Bahasa Indonesia. As an avid reader, I managed to get through the selection of the books in these stores pretty quickly and the high price of the books was not appealing either. My solution was to buy an eBook reader and it has easily become one of the best purchases I have ever made in my life. I can carry around thousands of books on something smaller than a netbook that weighs less than half a kilo. I have an unlimited library at my disposable thanks to the internet and have been enjoying some of my favorite classics.

There are a few options out there for eBook readers, with the most popular version being the Amazon Kindle, which also happens to have the broadest selection of books available for purchase online. I chose a different device though and went for the Archos 7 Home Tablet. It works great as an eBook reader and unlike the Amazon Kindle features a color LCD screen, and it also can play videos, music and browse the internet via WiFi. To me it was worth the extra $50 to have all of those extra functions, but they are both perfectly capable of their main function that I was looking for, reading books.