Electrocuted by e-book reader

[snopes]

Comment: I recently got a Kindle e-reader, which I often read in the bath.
This is apparently shocking to some people as they think I'm going to get
electrocuted if I drop it. A bit of Googling suggests this is a widely
held belief and is used as an argument against e-readers by those who
don't like them anyway.

I don't see how a battery-operated device could electrocute someone unless
it was plugged into the mains at the time or was faulty enough to explode,
but I would have to destroy my e-reader to prove this!

[Auntie Witch]

This person is still alive.

So is this person.

And this person.

And this one.

I bet they all stood over the tubs reading, instead of actually being IN the tubs, though.

[JoeBentley]

E-ink based E-readers like the Kindle and the Nook are extremely low power devices. The don't draw much more then some high end digital watches.

[Troberg]

No risk, the battery simply can't produce that much current. It will probably destroy the Kindle, though, and if it has LiPo batteries (I don't know what kind of batteries it has), it may cause them to "explode" (not formally a detonation, just a very rapid deflagration).

Also, why should the current go through you? It just wants to run between the poles of the battery, and it takes the shortest path. Even in the unlikely event that you have your finger inside the casing, right in the path of the current, water is a pretty bad conductor of electricity, and getting some moderate current through your fingertip isn't dangerous anyway. It has to go through the heart to be really dangerous, unless we are talking about extreme currents.

This is also the reason the movie standard of "killing with a hair dryer in the bath tub" doesn't work. The current really don't want to get to the person in the water, it just wants to go home through the other lead, which is usually just a few millimeters away. It's not like in the movies where all the water becomes lethal as soon as something electric touches it (and especially not if the water is in contact with electric ground, such as piping).

I would recommend, just to be sure, however, that if you drop a mains powered electric device in the bath tub, pull out the cord before leaving the tub, or, if that's not possible, jump out. You do not want to stand with one foot in the tub and the other on a whet tile floor, that's the potential risk situation.

And, yes, I know the MythBusters did a show on this and found it to be dangerous. I don't know where they effed up, but they did. My guess is that they made a bit too many assumptions with the body simulate, the way they measured the current or had some water leakage to the measuring points, because their results fly in the face of all science on the subject. It could also be the standard US litigation fear, that they were afraid that if they told that it was pretty harmless and someone got hurt, they'd get sued. They pretty much did that on the "cell phone on an aircraft" episode.