Learning

My Life in EPUBs, PDFs, and Open Tabs

teodulfo.espero

June 29, 2025

Fair warning: this post takes a bit of reading and includes a little language and a lot of honesty.
Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

There are people who journal. People who meditate. People who wake up at 5 a.m. and go for mindful walks.

My wife is one of those people. She does yoga and drinks her tea hot.

Me? I make the coffee, open three tabs, start a PDF, highlight an EPUB, forget all of them, and go back to making more coffee.

I read in fragments — not because I can’t focus, but because I’m constantly chasing something new I’m curious about. I’ll start an article, then jump to a related book, then open a random tab on something kind of connected but not really. It’s not chaos… it’s a system. A weird, enthusiastic, slightly overcaffeinated system.

My iPad is both my reading companion and my chaos manager. It holds my Apple Books library, my academic PDFs, my internet rabbit holes, and also — on more than one occasion — my cereal bowl.

This is not a minimalist reading journey. It’s cluttered, digital, delightful, and only 10% complete.
But it’s mine. And honestly? I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Where It All Started

I grew up in the Philippines, where sometimes reading is a luxury. As a kid, I read whatever I could get my hands on — wrappers, old Reader’s Digest magazines, textbooks, pamphlets, discarded manuals. Anything with words on it became fair game.

When I could afford it, I’d buy used books from stalls or friends, worn copies of classics or forgotten novels that had already changed hands too many times.
Books were an escape. Books were possibility. Books were everything.

It Started Innocently…

It wasn’t always this chaotic. There was a time when I read one book at a time — like a normal person. But then I discovered PDFs. Then EPUBs. Then RSS readers. Then free online archives. Then JSTOR access through school. Then… well, you know how it goes.

Suddenly, I had dozens of tabs, dozens of files, all “for later,” all “important,” all “just need a quick skim.”
Now my reading list is 90% intention, 10% progress.

Reading on an iPad Is Both Amazing and Dangerous

Let’s be real: reading on an iPad is like having a library, a notebook, and a bottomless pit of distraction in your hands. It’s amazing because I can carry every book I love, highlight freely, search anything instantly.

It’s dangerous because one second I’m reading about BGP routing, then move on to reading a*sholes responding to my posts in Stackoverflow (yes, I have the darn Stack Exchange app too), the next I’m deep in a 2009 Reddit thread about Cold War military satellites. I’ve also opened X (formerly known as Twitter). I’ve opened Instagram (still known as Instagram). The Notes app. The Maps app — and why the hell am I in Maps?

And yes, when sh*t hits the fan, I’ve used it to connect remotely to my work Surface Pro. Because chaos respects no set schedule and doesn’t give a f*ck about what you’re doing — and neither do my troubleshooting instincts.

And sometimes? My iPad is just a very expensive coaster.
It holds my cereal bowl. It holds soup which I just heated in the microwave. It protects my palms from coffee mugs that are way too hot or — when I’m being really honest — a stream box for all my subscriptions.
Netflix, YouTube, Peacock, Max, Prime, Disney, and Hulu are all just a swipe away.

But I digress. At this point, it’s not just a reading tool — it’s my sidekick, my second brain, and occasionally, my food tray.

With all the beatdown it has received, I’m surprised it’s still alive.

Shoutout to Apple Books

Can we talk about how Apple Books is criminally underrated? It’s clean, searchable, syncs across devices, and lets me highlight in colors that match my mood — which is usually “trying to understand Chapter 4 with coffee.”

It’s where I keep a rotating library of tech manuals, management books, geopolitics, history, art, psychology, adventure, sci-fi (yeah, I know — I’m still stuck around 30%, okay maybe more, on 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), short stories, and novels by Clancy and Ludlum.
Why Clancy and Ludlum? Because some days I want to decode security protocols — and other days, I just want to watch the world nearly collapse and get saved by a guy with top-secret clearance and steel-plated guts.

No judgment. No folders. Just vibes and information.

I Am a Digital Squirrel

If you peeked into my digital storage, you might think I’m secretly writing a dissertation on five completely unrelated topics.
I hoard articles. I hoard PDFs. I hoard documentation pages I might “someday” read.
Sometimes I open a file and think, Who saved this and why?
Oh right — it was me.
Past me thought I’d need it.
Present me agrees.
Future me rolls his eyes.

But that’s the thing — this weird, sprawling, nonlinear way of reading? That’s how I stay curious.
It’s how I survive working full-time, juggling grad school, being married (no kids yet), collecting toys, and still making time to scribble in margins.

Yes, I scribble on the pages. That’s not weird, right?
Sometimes they’re simplified notes, sometimes questions, sometimes “wait, what?” moments, or full-on arguments with the author.
I paraphrase. I object. I question. I highlight. I underline. I draw arrows.
And occasionally, I just write “NO” in the margin — respectfully, of course.
And more often than not, those scribbles become the seeds for my next blog post.

Also — and I say this with pride — I have library cards from four different systems.
Because borrowing from multiple libraries just feels like a cheat code for max-level reading access.
If I could get interlibrary loan across galaxies, I’d sign up today.

Let’s not talk about bookmarks.
On my browser? I have tons — folders inside folders, saved “for later” since 2018.
And no, I’m not deleting them. One day I will read them.
Probably. Maybe.

And yes — I pay for a Dropbox subscription just to keep all my sh*t together (and somehow organized — wink, wink).
Call it cloud clutter. Call it digital hoarding.
I call it being prepared.

Learning in the Margins

Here’s the thing: even if I don’t finish everything, just being exposed to ideas matters.

Cognitive scientists like Benedict Carey, in his book How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens, point out that even fragmented reading — the kind where you bounce between topics, leave things half-read, or skim before bed — can actually strengthen learning.
Why? Because your brain keeps working on it long after you stop. It starts connecting dots, sorting ideas, and weaving meaning in the background — like a quiet assistant tidying up mental files while you do the dishes.

This style of learning connects closely to something called interleaving — a technique that involves studying different topics in rotation instead of focusing on one for hours.
So maybe I read a few pages on psychology, then a chapter on history, then skim a saved PDF about data ethics. It feels chaotic, but that cognitive effort to switch gears makes learning more durable.
You’re not just memorizing — you’re learning how to navigate, compare, and apply ideas across contexts.

Carey uses a great analogy: practicing music.
Play the same song on repeat and you’ll get stuck. Mix up the songs — even if it’s harder — and you’ll grow faster.
Same goes for reading. It’s not about perfection. It’s about deliberate struggle, which makes the brain work harder — and remember better.

And it’s not just Carey who says this. In Make It Stick, Peter Brown, Henry Roediger III, and Mark McDaniel argue that the most effective learning happens when it’s active, effortful, and spread out over time.
They emphasize three key strategies:

  • Retrieval: trying to recall what you’ve read
  • Spacing: letting time pass before reviewing again
  • Interleaving: switching between subjects

For example, instead of rereading a chapter over and over, they recommend closing the book and trying to remember what you just read — even if you mess it up. That struggle? That’s where the learning happens.

I’ve told you before. I do read stuff. I don’t just pull things out of my a*s.

I scribble on pages, pause to jot notes, and revisit concepts that confuse me.
Sometimes I understand an idea on the fourth try. Sometimes the twentieth. And honestly? That’s okay.

Learning isn’t linear — it’s layered (Brown et al., 2014; Carey, 2014).

Here’s my take on it:

  • Brown et al. (2014) in Make It Stick emphasize that mastery comes from repeated exposure, spaced retrieval, and interleaving — which naturally builds learning over time and in layers.
  • Carey (2014) discusses how the brain consolidates learning in nonlinear, recursive ways — especially when information is encountered out of sequence or fragmented.

That’s also why I write so much — not to flex, not just to remember, but to make sense of things at my own pace.

As I shared in Why I Don’t Do Videos (Yet), I don’t speak smoothly. I wish I could. It’s still a work in progress.
But writing? That’s where I’m fluent. It’s how I untangle ideas, especially the complicated ones that take time to unfold.

Modesty aside, I’m good at writing stuff. At least I believe I am — and no one’s stopped me yet, so I’m running with it.
It’s how I carve clarity from confusion.

Let’s be clear though:
I’m not the smartest dude in the room.
Don’t believe me? See I Try (Like, Really Try) — I once Googled “multi-threaded asynchronous event loop” five minutes after pretending I knew what it was.

But I try hard to understand it. And slowly, I do.

So yes, I may skim one paragraph and deep-dive the next.
And if I still don’t get it?
It’s the For Dummies version to the rescue (see Why I Buy For Dummies Books Before Opening the Textbook (and You Should Too if You Like Sanity)).
Pride is temporary. Clarity is forever.

But it’s all part of how I’m learning — in motion, in margins, in between everything else.
Not flashy. Not perfect. But persistent as hell.

If I’m being fully honest?
I wanted to study history and politics — not tech.
I’ve always daydreamed about being a political adviser in the Philippines — shaping policy, fixing bureaucracy, maybe even writing speeches behind the scenes for dramatic press briefings no one remembers the next day.

But here I am — parsing network protocols by day, reading political theory by night, and scribbling in both margins like they belong in the same notebook.

Or maybe I’m just trying to justify my pile of unfinished sh*t to read.

References

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