Quote:
Originally Posted by DNSB
Perhaps a solar powered USB charger might be an important item to add to your desert island list -- all those books on your devices and no way to read them. Even on a backpacing trip where power sources may not be that easy to find, it can come in handy.
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I actually have a couple. A larger one suited for car camping and a smaller one that is a lot smaller and lighter that could be used for backpacking, though I've never carried it. In both cases, you use the solar panel to charge a secondary battery during the day, then use that secondary battery to recharge your devices.
One of the reasons I got a paperwhite a couple of years ago (the other reason being Amazon stopped supporting the old original Kindle that I had) is that it will hold a charge for up to a month at a time. Before that, I carried one of the Sony ebook readers. Even on a two week backpacking trip, I never had issues with it running out of juice, but that was reading it maybe an hour a day tops. In general, when backpacking, you don't want to carry a lot of extra weight.
For a number of years, a group of my backpacking friends and I would spend 4 or 5 days at a primitive camp site on one of the Georgia barrier islands that you could only get to via ferry. Basically, you carry a pack and a cooler and they would drop you off at the camp site, so it's car camping without the car. Since I'm not a big sun person, I would stay in the shaded camp site during the heat of the day and read and roam the beach in the early morning and evening. I would usually get through 5 or 6 books. That was really the genesis of this thread. For a true deserted island, I would want a very different mix of books that included a lot more of the handy man and survival type books. I was thinking mostly of entertainment books.