At Grist, we are very much into creative reuse, so we cannot help but be excited about 101 Uses of a Dead Kindle, a book of illustrations that the U.K. Booksellers Association has, somewhat cheekily, named one of the top five Christmas books of the year. (Because who would want to celebrate obsolete e-readers more than people who sell real paper books?)
Adrian Searle and Judith Hastie have some really creative ideas for what you should be doing with your dead block of electronics, rather than sending it back to Amazon for a replacement. You might use it as a chopping board or a spatula, for instance.
You might use it in association with small animals — to scoop their poop, clean them up if they’ve turned into roadkill, hit them over the head if they are meerkats, or send them tobogganing down a hillside.
You might use your Kindle as an S&M paddle. They have a lot of ideas relating to Kindles and the protection of genitals, as well; they envision them as speedos, chastity belts, and cricket boxes (what we would call “baseball cups”).
We’re not so sure that shooting Kindles as skeet counts as recycling, though.
There’s always the classic option, too: the doorstop. Might we also suggest … bookmark?
