eReaders and E Ink devices in general are known for having excellent battery life. A Kindle can easily go weeks between charges, and that's largely true across the wider world of E Ink devices too. It's one of the biggest reasons I've always loved using them. Unlike my phone, tablet, laptop and practically every other accessory, charging is rarely something I have to actively think about.

Despite that, there's always room to squeeze a little more battery life out of them. So, when I noticed one of my eReaders draining faster than I expected, I started poking around its settings to see what I could change. One simple toggle made a far bigger difference than I expected.

Vacation gave my eReader a proper battery test My vacation accidentally became a battery benchmark

I rotate between a lot of eReaders. I've used Kindles, Kobos, Boox devices, and plenty of others over the years. While that once used to be just because I enjoyed reading, it's now largely for review purposes, which I always do by actually using the devices as part of my everyday routine.

The downside is that I don't always stick with one eReader long enough to notice its quirks outside of a review period. This means that while I always know the battery life I'm getting during testing, I rarely get a sense of how well it holds up over weeks of regular, uninterrupted use.

That changed when I went on vacation with just my Boox Note Air 5C. It was the only eReader I packed, so for once, I was using the same device every day for an extended period. While I wasn't reading on it for hours on end, I still found myself watching the percentage drop far faster than I expected from an E Ink device. I ended up having to plug it in twice over an 11-day trip, which felt unusually frequent for an eReader.

Android eReaders have a very different battery problem My eReader was doing far too much while asleep

The Note Air 5C isn't quite like a Kindle or Kobo. It's an Android eReader, which means I can install regular apps from the Play Store and use it much more like a tablet. That's a huge part of why I like Boox devices, but it also means there are far more things capable of quietly using power in the background.

In my case, Wi-Fi was staying connected even while I wasn't actively using the device. That meant I was still getting Gmail notifications, Google Calendar alerts, and notifications from other apps I'd installed for testing. I even had Instagram sitting on there from a previous experiment, so my supposedly sleeping eReader was a lot more connected than I realized.

When I started digging through the Note Air 5C's power settings, I found that Boox lets you decide what happens to Wi-Fi after the device goes to sleep. Mine was effectively staying connected, so I changed it to disconnect Wi-Fi as soon as the eReader entered sleep mode. While I was at it, I also enabled the setting to turn off Bluetooth after sleep, since there was no reason for either connection to stay active while the device was sitting untouched.

The difference showed up almost immediately. When I compared the overnight battery drain before and after making the change, it dropped to roughly a third of what it had been. In other words, my projected standby battery life had effectively tripled overnight!

I made this change the second time I had to charge my eReader on vacation, and I've since returned home and read two more books on it. I still haven't had to plug it in again, which is a pretty stark difference from needing to charge it twice over an 11-day trip. In fact, the Power page within Settings currently estimates that my device will last another 22 days and 22 hours at 33% battery, which is much closer to the kind of endurance I'd expect from an E Ink device.

This isn’t a fix for every eReader Your Kindle can probably sit this one out

As dramatic as the difference has been for me, this isn't necessarily a setting that will transform the battery life of every eReader. The reason it mattered so much on my Note Air 5C is that it's an Android-based device, with regular apps and background services that can take advantage of an active internet connection.

Something like a Kindle or Kobo is much more locked down and handles connectivity differently, so turning off Wi-Fi during sleep may not produce anything close to the same result.

Still, if you use a Boox device or another Android eReader and its battery life has never quite lived up to what you expected from E Ink, it's an incredibly easy setting to check. In my case, it took a few seconds to change and completely changed how often I have to think about charging the thing!