When the Pocketbook Ultra leaked in early March I had my doubts as to whether the images were real rather than the product of some designer’s daydream, but now it would seem that I was wrong.

Details are still scarce on the Pocketbook Ultra, but new leaks have confirm that this ebook reader really exists.

Several product listings on German retail websites have turned up online today. They are incomplete, and they still leave many important details unanswered, but it now looks like Pocketbook plans to launch the Ultra by the end of May 2014.

The Pocketbook Ultra has a Carta E-ink screen, making it a rara avis among ebook readers. When it ships it will be only the third device to use that screen, along with the newer Kindle Paperwhite and the recently launched Tolino Vision.

The listings also confirm that the Ultra will have a rear facing camera as well as OCR software, which I expect will be supported by a note-taking app of some kind. The Ultra will be available in Green and have a retail price of 199 euros.

The listings don’t mention the page turn buttons on the rear of the ebook reader, nor do they give the dimensions, weight, or other specs. One listing does indicate that the Ultra will be available by 30 May.

Pocketbook has yet to confirm or deny the Ultra, but at this point I would say that we are looking at their next ebook reader. The Ultra is the most innovative ebook reader design I have seen in several years now, and I can’t wait to learn more about it. Stay tuned for the official announcement.

Lesen.net

The frequently leaked Tolino Vision ereader officially launched today in Germany.

At 178 grams and 8mm thick, this device is both lighter and thinner than its predecessor, the Tolino Shine, and it is going to be only the second ebook reader to feature E-ink’s newest Carta screen tech.

The Vision will be running a closed version of Android on a 1GHz Freescale i.MX6 CPU with 512MB RAM and 2GB of available storage. It also has a microSD card slot, Wifi, and access to 25GB of cloud storage.

The 6″ screen has a resolution of 1024 x 758, the same resolution as on the Kobo Aura, Tolino Shine, and other 6″ ebook readers. And like many other ereaders, the Vision has both a frontlight and a capacitive touchscreen.

But unlike most other ebook readers, the Vision has the latest in E-ink screen tech. The spec sheet specifically mentions that the Vision has the Carta E-ink screen, which  features both improved contrast, faster refreshes, and extra geek points. (This last is not a practical feature, but it can be useful when a Vision owner is playing a game of one-ups-manship against other ereader owners.) The Carta screen also has the Regal waveform refresh tech integrated. This tech also launched last Fall, and it reduces the need for a full page screen refresh.

There’s little English language coverage so far, but I did find this hands on video posted earlier today. The narration is in German, but at least the images will give you a good idea of what the Vision can do:

The Tolino Vision is going to be available at a number of German retailers on Saturday, 5 April. Retail will be 129 euros, or about 30 euros more than the Tolino Shine. That cheaper ereader is going to continue to be available as a more budget-priced compliment to the Vision.

This device will also have a number of accessories, including a screen protector as well as several cases.  The accessories leaked yesterday, revealing prices between 10 and 30 euros.

The Tolino Shine and Vision are supported by a consortium which included four media retailers and Deutsche Telekom which pooled their resourced in March of last year to launch the Tolino platform. Collectively the 5 companies accounted for 35% to 40% of the German ebook market.

After a year’s worth of marketing and development at a cost of millions of euros (and even the bankruptcy of Weltbild), the Tolino consortium believes they have 37% of the German ebook market.

BuchReport.de

Sony announced in February that they were shutting down the NA branch of the Sony Reader Store and transferring their customers to Kobo, but that process really only started about a week ago – and it’s not going very well.

Numerous former Sony customers are reporting that store credits and some ebooks did not make it from one retailer to the other, while some are reporting an even more worrisome tale. What’s worse, several readers have shown up in the comment section of this blog with reports that they still have not received an email with instructions on how to transfer their account.

Many of those who have gotten the invite email report that most but not all of their ebooks have transferred:

• I checked my gmail account this morning at about 3 AM and there were my instructions. When I finished the click trail, 31 out of 37 books transferred to Kobo.
• 38 of my 41 books transferred. 3 didn’t. 2 of those that didn’t transfer automatically are available for purchase at Kobo.
• I finally got my transfer email. 621 out of 729 books transferred over in a matter of minutes. The list of ones that didn’t make it looked suspiciously large though, so I took a closer look. Over 40 of the books that didn’t transfer are available on Kobo.
• 92 out of 110 transferred successfully. It claimed the others didn’t transfer because they are not in the Kobo store.

On a related note, Kobo has also confirmed that not all of the existing store credits have transferred; they are working on fixing this issue.

Readers are getting mixed reports for why certain titles didn’t transfer even though Kobo sold the titles in question, with Kobo CS telling some that the titles would be added to their account manually while others have been told that it simply wasn’t possible for the ebooks to be added manually:

I just had a long talk with Kobo’s help desk. I was told that they CAN NOT add these two books to my Kobo account manually. When I told them that others (such as yourself) have reported that books are being added to their accounts manually, the customer service agent went off-line to talk to a supervisor, and then stated once again that if the automatic transfer failed to transfer some books, then the missing books CAN NOT be added manually to the Kobo account.

Furthermore, the service agent stated that they (Kobo) have a list of books; titles and authors; that they have determined are not eligible to transfer from Sony to Kobo, and that my two books are on this ineligible list. (Note: I made up the name ‘ineligible list’ Kobo’s service agent didn’t call it this.)

That last bit about a list of titles which Sony and Kobo have refused to transfer is new to me; Kobo has not shared that list publicly nor even mentioned it on their website. What they do say is:

Most of the Reader Store catalogue is available in the Kobo Store, so there are very few eBooks that won’t transfer to your Kobo library.

That is by no means the same thing. I have queried Kobo for an explanation, and I will report back with their response.

In spite of the bumps in the road, anyone whose books have transferred is in a much better position than some former Sony customers. Several people have left comments as recently as last night with reports that they not received an email notifying them of the option to transfer their account to Kobo.

Given that Kobo explicitly states that emails were sent out in late March, anyone who has not gotten an email should probably start panicking. I would suggest that you contact Kobo and ask them about it.

While the deadline for the transfer is still a couple months away, there is a concern that anyone who didn’t get an email from Kobo in late March might also miss later warning emails about the deadline. This is a matter which should not be left to the last minute.

Over the next couple months Sony and Kobo will be sending out other emails with new details, including news about firmware updates. The Sony Reader will be getting a couple firmware updates in April and May which will tie the device in with Kobo’s bookstore.  The update is only going to be released for the T1, T2, and T3, but not any of Sony’s earlier models.

With the exception of the PRS-9xx models, Sony’s earlier models lacked wireless connectivity and thus will not be affected by the transfer. Kobo ebooks can be loaded on to those older models by transferring the ebooks over USB, just like with any other Epub ebook.

It’s long  been known that publishers (and even some authors) have bought their way onto prestigious best seller lists, but until now it hasn’t been very easy to pull off the same trick in digital best seller lists.

My Buying Community wants to change that. This site launched some time back with the simply goal of helping authors game the Kindle Store best seller list, and it just crossed my desk this week.

Like the MyKindex site which operated for a period of time last year, MBC connects authors with a willing pool of book buyers. The site looks to be entirely author funded, and from what I can tell as a reader it works along the same lines as the services that sold reviews to authors like John Locke.

A user signs up, request to purchase a book, and after the purchase is verified the user is credited the price of the ebook plus an additional 30%. After a user buys enough books to pass the minimum payment threshold, they can request a Paypal funds transfer.

Or at least that is how the site is supposed to work; I just signed up today and I am still waiting for the credit for the ebook I bought. It’s a $.99 title in the Kindle Store with 4  five star reviews.

It’s not clear yet whether this site will have any effect on the Kindle Store best seller list, nor does the site claim it can do that. Instead it merely says that it connects readers to new authors.

But the site operates in a shady manner, and I learned of it via the developer of My Kindex,  which did boast of manipulating the French Kindle Store’s best seller list, so I am more than comfortable with attributing nefarious goals to this otherwise nondescript site.

My Buying Community claims to have 10,000 members, and if that is true and the site marshals all of its members to buy a single title then they well could affect that ebook’s rank in the Kindle Store.

Hopefully Amazon is already aware of this site, and is taking steps to thwart it.

BooksOnBoard may have abruptly gone out of business last April but that doesn’t mean it’s completely gone. Some remnant is still active, and last week it filed an antitrust lawsuit.

Abbey House Media, the Texas-based company that owned and ran BooksOnBoard, filed a lawsuit in Manhattan last Friday. The lawsuit alleges that Apple colluded with 5 publishers, HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster, to raise the price of ebooks and artificially restrict competition via price controls.

They’re basically making the same argument as the one Diesel eBooks made when that ebookstore filed its suit a couple weeks ago. Both parties are pointing to the lawsuit which the Department of Justice filed against Apple and the publishers in April 2012. The 5 publishers settled before trial, but Apple lost in July 2013.

BooksOnBoard (and Diesel eBooks) are arguing that they are two of the parties harmed by conspiracy, with BooksOnBoard even going so far as to claim that Agency is what killed it. (Diesel eBooks isn’t quite dead yet, but it is shutting down 5 days from now.)

According to the complaint, BooksOnBoard says that before Agency took effect in April 2010, they were the largest independent ebook retailer in the United States, with revenue behind only Amazon and Barnes & Noble. (I think they are exaggerating for effect.)

This retailer launched in 2006, before the Kindle, and they built their customer base via aggressive pricing of their large ebook catalog. But all of that changed in 2010. "Once Apple and the publisher defendants entered into their price-fixing agreement, however, BooksOnBoard was no longer able to offer its favorable pricing," the lawsuit states. "After years of steady growth, in April 2010 — right after the imposition of agency — BooksOnBoard quickly went under for all intents and purposes."

While I do believe that they suffered under Agency, I also think that the claim that Agency killed BoB in April 2010 is rather hyperbolic. The retailer didn’t cease operations until April 2013, so their demise was not nearly as sudden as they would make it sound. Rather, the death of BooksOnBoard more closely resembles a case of slow strangulation rather than a sudden act of violence.

But how BooksOnBoard died isn’t really that important; what matters is that Agency made it much more difficult for this retailer to compete effectively. Rather than foster competition, as many in publishing industry have claimed, Agency pricing discouraged buyers from shopping around, thus making it harder for the smaller retailers to attract and keep customers.

And I’m sure it didn’t help the indies that shortly after Agency came to pass, ereader prices dropped through the floor. That encouraged readers to buy a device tied to one of the majors and then primarily shop with that major ebook retailer.

As ex-retailers, BooksOnBoard and Diesel eBooks have no further need of publishers as a source of content. This removes what little disincentive remained  to discourage the retailers from filing suit, which means that they can keep pursuing this lawsuit until they either lose or their lawyers quit.

I do not expect the publishers or Apple to settle this lawsuit, so this is probably going to drag out over several years. Barring some unexpected ruling, I would place the over-under at 3 years.

Thanks, Anne!

When I reported the speculation yesterday that Diesel eBooks might be shutting down in 5 days, I was hoping that I had gotten the story wrong. Sadly, that’s not the case.

I have just received official notice from Diesel eBooks that they are turning off the lights at the end of March. It basically said the same thing as the message on the support page:

Diesel eBooks will be closing at the end of this month. It’s been a great ride!  We’re exploring our options – eBooks are still in the infant years and there are many opportunities opening up now and in the future.

IMPORTANT: you must download your eBooks by month end. Downloads will not be possible on April 1st.  We want to thank you for being such loyal customers. Understand this doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t see Diesel in another form in the near future.

If you have not received an email yet, I can explain; Diesel eBooks’s email system is broken. I in fact got 16 copies of this one email, all sent within a single minute. Chances are the system is eating as many emails as it is sending, so some Diesel eBooks customers may never get a notice.

If you want confirmation, go check out the home page over at Diesel eBooks. Earlier this morning they posted an announcement banner with the news that they’re shutting down.

Diesel eBooks was founded in 2004, during the pre-Kindle ebook era. It sold a number of ebook formats over the years, including eReader, Mobipocket, MSReader, PDF, and Epub. Most of those ebook formats predeceased Diesel eBooks, which says something about how much the ebook market has changed over the years. This retailer also expanded into selling ebook readers from 2009, and they also offered a rewards program and ebook bundles.

I’ve bought ebooks from them over the years (mainly in the pre-agency era). It was an okay site with decent prices, customer service, and tech support, and that should have been enough to keep it competitive. Unfortunately, Diesel eBooks is one of the smaller indie ebook retailers that never really recovered from Agency Pricing.

When the 5 publishers started the agency era in early 2010, the first thing they did was cancel existing contracts with ebook retailers and renegotiate. Guess who were the publishers' lowest priority for signing the new contracts? Indies like Diesel eBooks. It took some indies months and months to get the new contracts signed, and that cost them a competitive disadvantage.

And under the new system, the ebook retailers were unable to lower their prices on any of the titles published by the big 6, which limited their ability to attract and keep customers. Yes, fixed ebook prices may have prevented Amazon’s price-gouging, but it also helped discourage customers from shopping around. That made it a heck of a lot harder for indies to pry customers away from the majors.

Diesel eBooks is now the second indie ebookstore to fail in the past year. The first was BooksOnBoard, which abruptly ceased operations last April. I doubt they will be the last.

Edit: I should also add that Diesel eBooks may not be totally dead. A few weeks ago its owners filed an antitrust suit against the 5 publishers and Apple that made up the Price Fix 6.  Should they win the lawsuit they might be able to reopen.

With little fanfare, the UK retailer Tesco launched their new ebook store today. This highly anticipated site was first announced last March, and its launch completes Tesco’s digital trifecta.

BlinkBox Books offers a broad selection of titles which can be read on the related Android, iPhone, or iPad apps as well as on compatible ebook readers or on Tesco’s Hudl tablet. Tesco hasn’t revealed just how many titles they carry, but reports have been circulating that Tesco has been aggressively pursuing deals with publishers.

Update: Guess what? Blinkbox Books doesn’t support ereaders. I think that’s a good reason to avoid the store.

This UK retailer has been working to build a digital content store for several years now. They’ve bought several companies, including Blinkbox (a movie service), We7 (music), and MobCast (a white-label ebookstore). That last was bought in September 2012, which should give you an idea just how long Tesco has been working towards today’s launch.

Tesco has also launched an Android tablet in September 2013. The Hudl, which was developed in partnership with the French tablet maker Archos, was clearly intended to compliment the BlinkBox content store in much the same way that the Kindle Fire tablet complements Amazon’s music, video, and ebook retail operations.

As of early December Tesco reported that they had sold 300,000 Hudle tablets in just under 2 months. A second model was rumored to launch in March, but I think that window may have passed.

BlinkBox Books is being launched into a highly competitive market where several strong retailers have already staked a claim. In addition to Amazon, Kobo, Apple, and Google, there are also local competitors like Sainsburys and Waterstones, which sells Epub ebooks in addition to selling Kindles.

The latest estimates peg the UK ebook market at £80 million in 2013, an increase of 20% from 2012. Around 29% of respondents in a survey have read an ebook recently.

Here’s a two week old story that doesn’t seem to have gotten much attention.

Diesel eBooks, one of the lesser known (but still thriving) ebook retailers in the US, filed an antitrust lawsuit earlier this month. This retailer is alleging that it was harmed when 5 publishers conspired to bring about agency pricing. HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan, Penguin, and Simon & Schuster are all named in the suit, with Apple as the lead defendant.

I was wondering when this would happen.

Ever since the 5 publishers settled the antitrust lawsuit brought against them by the DOJ in 2012 I had been waiting for ebook retailers to file a similar lawsuit. The DOJ settlement only dealt with restitution for consumers that were forced to pay a higher price for ebooks, but they weren’t the only affected party.

Agency Pricing enabled publishers to control the retail prices of the ebooks they published, and that control restricted ebookstores from competing by selling the ebooks at a cheaper price. In short, Diesel eBooks is arguing that Agency artificially restrained the ability of Diesel eBooks to compete in the market.

Would anyone care to make a bet as to how long it will take before the publishers settle? Given that they have already tacitly admitted to the conspiracy when they settled with the DOJ, any defense they might mount in this case will be weak. I would like to say that they have no defense, but that doesn’t mean they cannot stall the case with motions, appeals, and other tricks. They might even be able to win on a technicality.

Apple, on the other hand, is probably going to fight this case as vigorously as they are continuing to appeal the antitrust lawsuit brought by the DOJ. Apple may have lost that case, but they are continuing to fight it on appeal. And they might win, too.

Nielsen has revealed today that ebook purchases in the UK rose by 20% in 2013, with self-published titles making up one sale in five.

The details were released at the at the Nielsen Books & Consumers Conference on Wednesday, and according to Nielsen researcher Steve Bohme the UK ebook market reached £300 £80 million in 2013. eBooks accounted for about 1 in 4 book purchases last year, but they also represented a far smaller share of the market than one might assume.

Like the US, paper books still dominate the UK book market, with an estimated £2.2 billion spent on them in 2013. This is about a 4% drop in sales from 2012, which had two blockbuster releases (Hunger Games and 50 Shades).

Update: There were a number of errors in the source article in The Bookseller. The Uk ebook market was actually worth £300 million, with an estimated 80 million units sold.

Nielsen’s stats peg the UK ebook market at 3.5% of the overall UK book market. This would seem to be rather low to me, given that ebooks accounted for 25% of unit sales, but I suppose that if readers were buying a large volume of free ebooks, that might be throwing the calculations.

Self-published ebooks accounted for one in five ebook purchases, but they only represented 12% of the money spent. Given that self-published ebooks often sell for less than books from legacy publishers, this makes sense.

It would also explain why Nielsen has noticed a drop in the average selling price of ebooks. "The rise in self-publishing meant that in 2013, the average price paid for fiction e-books dropped to around 60% of that paid for fiction paperbacks," Bohme said.

The Bookseller

The long anticipated global expansion of B&N’s self-pub platform is finally happening. B&N announced on Tuesday that Nook Press is available in parts of Western Europe, including the UK.

Nook Press is now available to authors in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium. The platform supports all of those countries’ languages, and it offers authors the opportunity to earn up to 65% of the price they set.

B&N has revealed the pricing schedule for the UK, and promises that a similar schedule has been set for the other newly supported countries in Europe. Authors who price their books between £1.50 and £7.99 will receive 65% of the list price for ebooks sold in the UK Nook Store. For books priced outside that window (as low as 75p, as high as £120.00), the royalty drops to 40%.

In comparison, authors who sell their titles via KDP earn a 70% royalty (minus delivery fees) if their books are priced between £1.49 and £7.81, but books priced outside this range will only yield a 35% royalty rate. Unlike KDP, B&N does not tack on additional fees to the selling price nor do they also charge authors delivery costs. Of course, the Nook Store is also a visibly withering platform, but you cannot have everything.

Curiously enough,  while I can find details on UK prices in the FAQ on the Nook Press website, there’s no mention of the pricing schedule for the other 30 countries where B&N has been selling ebooks since November 2011. That would imply that B&N doesn’t distribute Nook Press titles to any of those countries, a detail which my source article appears to confirm.

Nook Press is available in 8 countries as of Wednesday morning, and B&N plans to make their self-pub platform available Canada, Australia, and Switzerland in the near future. That will bring the total number of supported countries to 11, which would leave authors in 2/3rds of the countries with local Nook Stores with no option for uploading their titles to Nook Press other than through a 3rd party service like Smashwords.

But even though only a limited number of countries are supported, B&N is promising to promote select titles in the Nook Store. The titles will be chosen by the Luxembourg-based Nook International team, which is lead by Colin Eustace. The works will be selected from any number of genres and topics based on popularity and sales. "We’re excited to promote any content," Eustace said.

The Bookseller

Barnes & Noble is showing every sign of losing interest in the consumer ebook market as they shift their focus to the educational market, but it looks like they have decided to tie up at least one loose string before the change in direction.

The Bookseller is reporting that Barnes & Noble will be launching their Nook Press self-publishing platform in the UK this week at the Oxford Literary Festival, which runs 22 March through 26 March. The festival will feature appearances by a number of well-known authors, including Ian McEwan, Eleanor Catton, Malorie Blackman, Michael Morpurgo, and more.

This year it will also feature Nook demos. Barnes & Noble is a sponsor of the festival this year, and in addition to partnering with Blackwell’s to show off the Nook hardware B&N will also be holding several sessions to promote Nook Press. The sessions will be held in the Festival Marquee, and will include talks on "Introduction to Self-Publishing with Nook" on 23 March and 25 March.

Colin Eustace, general manager of of the Luxembourg-based Nook international team said: "As Nook continues to grow in the UK we are proud to announce the upcoming launch of the Nook Press self-publishing platform and we invite authors and writers at the Oxford Literary Festival to speak to a representative for more information."

Barnes & Noble launched Nook Press, their second self-pub platform, in April 2013. It replaced PubIt, which had launched in late 2010. PubIt did not expand into the UK when B&N launched there in late 2012, and Nook Press has yet to expand to support self-published authors in the UK or the 30 other countries where B&N sells ebooks; until this week it were effectively limited to only self-published authors in the US.

There’s no word yet on when Nook Press might become available in the other 30 countries where B&N has a local Nook Store, but the Nook Press website does mention that they are accepting names of future beta testers for a number of countries in Europe: France, Italy, Germany, Spain, The Netherlands, and Belgium.

However, I do not expect those beta testers to be contacted.  B&N has recently announced that they were abandoning their Nook app for Windows 8 in favor of a not yet released reading app from Microsoft. They are effectively ceding the international Nook Store to Microsoft, so I would not expect them to have much interest in promoting self-published authors.

Update: B&N has opened up Nook Press to authors in 7 countries in Europe.

Free ebook sites are so common now that they are not just a dime a dozen, they’re a dime a gross. All of the major ebook stores have free ebooks, and you can find even more free (and legal) sites with a simple Google search.

But sometimes I need a site that has ebooks worth reading, doesn’t have DRM, and doesn’t require an account. And that’s why I put together this list of I go to when I need reading material and am in a hurry.

Feedbooks

Feedbooks is by no means the biggest free ebook site and it’s not the easiest to navigate, but it comes first in my list because the ebooks are well-formatted and are available in Epub, Kindle, and PDF. It’s nice to have that last option because there have been times where I was using a device which did not have a reading app other than Adobe Reader. (Yes, it does happen.)

Also, Feedbooks has a mobile site, and that makes it a lot easier to download ebooks to the tablet I want to read them on.

Standard eBooks

This free ebook site is dedicated to producing the highest quality ebooks, and then giving them away. It was added to this list in mid-2017.

Baen Free Library

The Baen Free Library isn’t nearly as big as it was back before Baen Books started distributing ebooks to the Kindle Store and elsewhere, but it’s still a good source of mil-SF.

And if you have time, you might want to also check out Fifth Imperium. This site hosts copies of the CDs which Baen sometimes bundles into first edition hardbacks. They only have the CD images to download, so that site doesn’t fit the requirements of this post.

Smashwords

Smashwords is widely known as an ebook distributor, but they also have an ebook store with a lot of free original content.

Thanks to a recent update, this site is mobile-friendly. It also offers a wide variety of formats and does not require that you register before you download.

ManyBooks.net

This is one of the original free ebook sites, and it’s been around since long before the Amazon launched the Kindle in 2007. It pretty much only has public domain titles, and the last time I checked they were reasonably well formatted.

Project Gutenberg – Australia

I’m sure everyone who has read an ebook knows about Project Gutenberg, but fewer people know about the a similar site based in Australia (there’s one in Canada, too).

PG Australia made this list because it complements ManyBooks.net. The sites work under 2 different sets of copyright laws, and that means there are titles that one site can legally upload that cannot be found on the other site.

The Chinese ereader maker Onyx might not have the largest share of the global ebook reader market but they do have some of the more industrious and ambitious designers.

I have just found (via MobileRead) a spec sheet for the Onyx Boox i86. This big and beautiful ereader has an 8″ screen with a resolution of 1600 x 1200. At 250ppi this screen isn’t quite as sharp as the 6.8″ screen on the Kobo Aura HD, but it comes close.

The Onyx Boox i86 runs Android 4.0 on a 1GHZ CPU with 512MB RAM, 4GB Flash storage, and a microSD card slot. It also has Wifi and Bluetooth. On top of the high resolution screen you’ll find a frontlight and an IR touchscreen from Neonode.

I can also confirm that this device has at least one speaker or a headphone jack; one of the listed features is text to speech (provided by Ivona).

In terms of software, the i86 is probably running the same reading app as on Onyx’s other Android-based ebook readers (with the same note-taking and scribbling abilities). The spec sheet lists the usual broad range of format support, including ebook formats like PDF, Epub, and FB2 in addition to document formats like Doc, CHM, html, and RTF. There’s also support for MP3 playback.

The spec sheet also lists the i86 as having a Pearl E-ink screen, and not the newer Carta screen, which makes sense. This is one of E-ink’s existing screen sizes, and it is actually on the market.

This 8″ screen unit is used in the Pocketbook Color Lux ebook reader.  That device has an 8″ color E-ink screen, and because it has a color E-ink screen the Lux also has a quarter the screen resolution (800 x 600).

E-ink creates a color screen by placing a color filter on top of a black and white E-ink screen. The filter changes each of the pixels in the underlying screen to either red, green, or blue, and it also leaves a 4th pixel as b/w. Because the color E-ink screen takes 4 pixels to display one color pixel (RGBW), it reduces the screen resolution by 75%.

Along with a grey tinge, the problem with screen resolution is one of the reasons I don’t like color E-ink screens. I’m glad to see someone using the 8″ screen sans color filter, and I hope to see it on the market.