Category: E-readers

Pan Digital Novel

Posted by – September 6, 2010

7″ LCD e-reader, ARM11 based, with WiFi and Barnes and Noble book store support in the USA.

booq Avant 6″ SiPix e-reader

Posted by – September 6, 2010

6″ SiPix e-reader with a capacitive touch screen.

Onyx Boox X60

Posted by – September 6, 2010

Onyx International has improved their hardware design to provide a drop proof protection for the glass wacom enabled 6″ e-ink screen.

Elonex 710EB

Posted by – September 6, 2010

7″ LCD resistive touch screen e-reader.

Sony Reader PRS-650 Touch Edition

Posted by – September 5, 2010

Sony is releasing this new generation of e-readers with a very interesting infrared based touch screen Pearl e-ink readers, for sale at 229€ for the 6″ version.

PocketBook IFA 2010 Press Conference

Posted by – September 3, 2010

PocketBook is the third biggest e-ink e-reader maker and in this press conference they explain how they plan to become the biggest e-reader maker during the next couple of years. At IFA 2010, PocketBook is launching their new series of highly optimized e-readers that are targetted to be sold for good value, pricing and worldwide release will be around October.

PocketBook 603 Pro at IFA 2010

Posted by – September 3, 2010

CEO of PocketBook is presenting the new 603 Pro e-ink e-reader with 6″ digitizer pen e-ink touch screen, WiFi, Bluetooth, 3G and a bunch of embedded Linux features to allow for many new innovative uses.

PocketBook 903 Pro

Posted by – September 3, 2010

9.7″ e-ink with Wacom touchscreen, 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth, 2GB built-in, battery for 7000 page turns

PocketBook 902 Pro

Posted by – September 3, 2010

9.7″ e-ink screen, WiFi and Bluetooth, headphones, 2GB built-in, battery for 7000 page turns

iRiver Cover Story without and with WiFi

Posted by – September 3, 2010

iRiver is releasing this new 6″ resistive touch screen based e-ink e-reader. One to be launched at 219€ does not include the WiFi while the 249€ version does include WiFi.

iRiver WiFi e-ink e-reader on WHSmith e-book store

Posted by – September 3, 2010

iRiver has added WiFi to their e-ink e-reader and here they demonstrate wireless access to online book stores.

PocketBook to release 5 new e-readers

Posted by – August 21, 2010
Category: E-readers

The worlds third most popular e-ink device maker (after Amazon and Sony) is PocketBook Global (recent merger of PocketBook and Netronix). PocketBook has been releasing nice unlocked and open e-ink readers for a few years now, here Pocketbook’s new generation of e-readers is to be released on the worldwide markets around November, which they will demonstrate at IFA in Berlin on September 3-8th in Berlin, at which I will be making sure to film extensive video coverage from on this site.

Amazon’s $139 WiFi 6″ e-reader accelerates the expansion of the e-ink market and I don’t think it will hurt competition. The e-ink e-reader market is expected by some analysts to achieve sales of 15 million units this year, up from 5 million units last year. It’s a market in full boom. Those e-readers make people read again in times of TV and Internet distractions. Google Editions very likely will provide an alternative source of revenues for alternative e-ink e-reader makers to also be able to subsidize their devices based on content sales, I don’t think the Kindle store has to be the only e-book store in the world that can subsidize an e-reader hardware ecosystem. PocketBook also has their own BookLand.net content store with tens of thousands of e-books available. And the alternatives such as PocketBooks have attractive hardware features that Kindle doesn’t have such as not being locked into Amazon’s DRM walled garden, with a more open embedded Linux user interface, wacom touch screens are awesome and unlocked 3G/wifi/bluetooth and more really can be very great features for an expanding e-ink e-reader market.

PocketBook 603 Pro:
6″ e-ink with Wacom touchscreen, 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth, 2GB built-in, battery for 14000 page turns

PocketBook 903 Pro:
9.7″ e-ink with Wacom touchscreen, 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth, 2GB built-in, battery for 7000 page turns

PocketBook 602 Pro:
6″ e-ink screen, WiFi and Bluetooth, headphones, 2GB built-in, battery for 14000 page turns

PocketBook 902 Pro:
9.7″ e-ink screen, WiFi and Bluetooth, headphones, 2GB built-in, battery for 7000 page turns

PocketBook IQ:
Android 2.X on a color 7” TFT touchscreen (resistive?), WiFi and Bluetooth.

Those e-readers are based on Linux software which PocketBook announces as Open Source and they say there are already a lot of user-made apps and games. Here’s an application suggestion which I would recommend for PocketBook or the Linux open source community around it to create:

– Integration of Chrome to Phone functionality.

Hopefully that functionality can be extracted from Android 2.2 and included into an application to run on PocketBook’s embedded Linux OS. If this requires Android 2.2 and cannot be installed easilly enough on any other embedded Linux, then hopefully Google will release a version of Android for e-ink e-readers soon enough, which PocketBook could thus integrate. Another feature in Google’s Android for e-ink e-readers is I think the integration of Google Editions in a multitude of e-ink e-readers to compete with Amazon. This way, Google can also pay such third party device vendors a share of the profits then made on e-book and article sales.

I think it would be awesome if one could wirelessly beam any website, any article, properly automatically reformatted to be read on the e-ink e-reader. This would make these connected e-ink devices I think perfect companion devices with any laptop for people who like to read a lot. Google has I think open sourced the whole Chrome to Phone functionality since a few days ago.

New Kindle just $139, first on i.MX508? Google Editions integration?

Posted by – July 29, 2010

The new WiFi-only version of Kindle is $139, it uses the latest generation of E-Ink screens, with faster refresh, better contrast. It might be the worlds first e-reader to use the latest Freescale i.MX508 processor, which means the e-ink controller is integrated in the ARM processor SoC, which allows for 21% smaller design, 15% lower weight and significantly lower cost, while improving the processing speed at up to Cortex level to achieve faster refresh rates and optimizing more things such as doubling of battery runtime, faster e-book downloading times, usable web browsing speeds and more.

Sub-$140 connected e-ink e-readers are a big deal. Amazon is already selling more e-books to the Kindle e-readers than they are selling paper books. And consider that Amazon is the worlds largest online retailer of paper books. This e-book revolution has happened in less than 2 years since the release of the Kindle. Since Amazon’s strategy is to make revenues and profits from sales of the content on their closed Kindle platform, it should be even possible for Amazon to further lower the price as needed, thus $99 Kindle shouldn’t be far away. What happens, is that from about 5 million e-ink e-readers sold in 2009, there might be 15 million of those e-ink e-readers sold pretty soon.

Google is coming with the Google Editions E-book system later this summer, meaning next month or so. My big question is this, will Amazon allow Google’s e-book system onto all Kindles through a firmware update? The way for Amazon to allow this to happen would be for Google Book Store to be only complementary to Amazon’s current Book store. Basically, any titles that Amazon has in its store would be purchased through its own store, while google would only provide access to all contents that are not yet in the Kindle store. On those out of print or otherwise unavailable in Kindle Store contents, Amazon would be making a decent share of the revenue through a partnership agreement with Google. The point being that it could be great for Kindle and Google to have a partnership and a new firmware integration. If Amazon does not open its platform to Google, I expect we will see several new e-ink e-readers sold $99 or below from many manufacturers that will be using a special version of Android that Google must be working on to release with Google Editions. As Google will provide revenue sharing for the manufacturers of devices that access Google Editions and other online sources of monetizable contents, expect some type of AdSense for e-readers.

Source for this video: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com
Found through: http://techmeme.com

Flexible and unbreakable plastic E Ink screens

Posted by – June 24, 2010

Sriram Peruvemba, Vice president of marketing at E-ink, presents the new flexible plastic based E-ink display. That new plastic e-ink screen technology will make it more usable for school children to use E-ink based devices to read all their textbooks and for all to access all books and texts ever written in the whole world.

E-ink is for full readability, outdoors, with reading lights indoors, it basically provides near paper quality, perfect for reading hundreds of pages. Something that is not possible on the current LCD based iPad.

$99 Android e-ink e-reader platform enabled by Freescale i.MX51e and i.MX508

Posted by – June 14, 2010

I am a big fan of the e-reader market, it helps people read again, as TV and the Internet has taken over more and more of people’s time, the e-readers makes it possible to read any book, any article at any time with a quality up close near to paper quality.

I filmed an early Android e-ink prototype at CeBIT that was showcased by Gigabyte, now Freescale is pushing further the use of Android as the software stack for e-ink e-readers with the i.MX51e development board demonstrated in this video. This could mean awesome use of feed readers, where articles, blog posts could also be beamed from the Chrome browser extension directly to your Android based e-reader. The feature of adding text contents from your laptop to your e-reader could become really really powerful.

Delta Electronics color e-paper

Posted by – June 10, 2010

Delta Electronics and Japan’s Bridgestone Corporation have developed this 13.1 inch color e-paper prototype.

Pocketbook 602

Posted by – June 8, 2010

The Pocketbook 602 is a new touch screen, WiFi, Bluetooth, anti-glare matte resistive 6″ e-ink e-reader.

Gajah designs 5″ LCD E-Reader

Posted by – June 3, 2010

Gajah did win a 2009 IF design award.

Netronix 9.7″ LCD E-Reader

Posted by – June 3, 2010

Pocketbook 901 is released

Posted by – June 3, 2010

A nice looking and extremely affordable e-ink reader designed to be used at school, college etc… For about 350 US$ you get a 9.7′ e-ink screen! It does not have a touchscreen or Wifi, but a micro usb port and a sd slot.