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.

The UK reading charity Booktrust has just released a report which looks into that nation’s reading habits, and it has some good news for this ebook-loving blogger.

The 53 page report is based on a survey of 1,500 adults in England (but not Scotland or Northern Ireland), and it includes extensive details on reading habits including both paper and digital.

The report showed that a fifth of respondents never buy physical books, and that nearly as many (18%) don’t read paper books at all. A growing number of the respondents (45%) reported preferring watching tv shows and movies to reading, and over a quarter prefer the internet and social media to reading books (rising to 56% among 18-30 year olds).

This survey report mirrors the latest report from the Pew Research Center. The latter report doesn’t go into the same level of detail as the Booktrust survey nor does it ask the same questions, but its results did show a similar difference in reading preferences.

Both reports show similar levels of ebook adoption. Here in the US, Pew reported in January that 28% of Americans had read an ebook in the past year, while in England Booktrust reported that 29% of respondents had read an ebook at some point. The Booktrust survey goes on to break up that 29% and show that 20% of respondents read ebooks at least weekly, with another 9% reading ebooks less often.

Both reports show similar levels of paper book use, with Pew reporting that 76% of Americans had read a book in the past year, while Booktrust reported that 78% of the English had read a paper book "daily, at least week, or less often(?)".

Audiobooks, on the other hand, have only been adopted by about 6% of the respondents in the Booktrust survey. This stands in stark contrast to the US, where Pew reports that 14% of US adults had listened to an audiobook in the past year.

A later section of the survey delves into book ownership. As you might expect, the 6% of the respondents who read the most also owned the most books, averaging 994 titles in their library. Those bookworms read 12 books a month, while the group of next most enthusiastic readers (15%) read  3 to 4 books a month and had 252 books in their library. A similar group of voracious voracious readers (14%) read slightly fewer books but more magazines and other periodicals, and actually owned more books in their personal library (262).

Report (PDF)

Guardian

Marvel unveiled their long awaited adaptive audio feature yesterday at SxSW, and it has proven much more interesting than I had expected.

Adaptive audio, which was initially announced at SxSW last year under the codename Project Gamma, adds an audio element to Marvel’s digital comics. Described last year as a way to add an "adaptive, non-repetitive score" to digital comics, Project Gamma was intended to a background soundtrack which changed as a reader read the comic. The sound track was keyed to certain panels, and it was also supposed to respond to the speed at which the reader turned the page.

Or at least that’s what Project Gamma was supposed to do when it was announced last year; how well does it perform now?

If you like, you can find out for yourself. The new feature is available in the Marvel Unlimited app. This is a free download, and all of the titles that have the new audio are available as free samples. You’ll only get a part of each volume, but it’s enough to at least give you an idea of how the soundtrack adds to the reading experience.

 I tried the new feature on my iPad, and I think the soundtrack improves upon the original comic. The sounds ranged from music clips that set the mood to sounds that were tied to specific events in the story, and in general they improved upon the story.

Should I encounter new titles from Marvel that include audio I might buy them. But I won’t be buying any of the several titles released so far.

Marvel debuted the adaptive audio by adding it to comics originally published 10 years ago. Captain America: Winter Soldier is the inspiration for the movie that is coming out in April, so this move makes sense, but unfortunately the original comics are so old that they do not translate well to Marvel’s digital format.

The latest trick in comics is to avoid showing an entire page at once, and instead show each panel in sequence. This introduces time as a story telling element, which can add a lot to the reading experience.

The CA:WS comics I read are so old that they were not created as high definition digital files, and that is blindingly obvious when I tried to read them. Have you ever zoomed in on an image to the point that it was started getting fuzzy? That is what I frequently saw with the CA:WS comics.

This is regrettable because it detracts from the new audio feature. It also tells us that Marvel is only making a half-hearted effort to convert and sell their backlist, but that’s a tale for another post.

But in spite of Marvel’s early stumbles, they could have a real winner here – if it is used correctly. But if Marvel treats it like another gimmick and adds it to old titles simply to try to get you to buy them again, then they’ll ruin it. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen.

Cnet

The Chinese ereader maker Onyx has been teasing us with visions of their E-ink Android smartphone for well over a year now, and new reports suggest that it is about to hit the market. It’s now called the Midia InkPhone, and it is the hot story this week at the CeBIT trade show.

The InkPhone has a 4.3″ E-ink screen. The specific details on the current model are scarce, but my latest info (from October 2013) says that the screen resolution is 800 x 480 (specs confirmed by a new press release).

This phone is running Android 2.3 Gingerbread on  a 1GHz CPU with 512MB RAM, a microSD card slot, Wifi, Bluetooth, and support for EDGE networks. Unlike the Yotaphone, there’s no LCD screen. There’s also no camera, but given the limitations of the E-ink screen I don’t think you would want to take photos with it anyway.

This smartphone was developed by Onyx, but it’s being shown off this week by Arta Tech. This Polish firm is a local retail partner for Onyx, and they have committed to releasing the Midia InkPhone in Poland. There’s no word on the retail price or release date, but I have learned that Arta Tech initially announced this phone back in December 2013. This story only crossed my desk this morning when Engadget got to play with the InkPhone (those lucky bastards).

Engadget says that this phone will ship with only 4GB Flash storage and a Rockchip CPU. They don’t have any details on the price, but they did repeat the detail that the InkPhone should run for more than two weeks on a single charge of its 1.8Ah battery. They also posted a gallery of 9 photos. I can’t see them for some reason, but you may want to check them out.

Update: Engadget is now reporting that the InkPhone is expected to be available in Germany and Poland at some point in April. It’ll be priced at around €140 ($195).

But even though I can’t see those photos I do have a video I can share. Charbax got a look at this smartphone back in October:

Barnes & Noble has lost over a billion dollars on their digital investment in the past 4 years but they’re not going to let that continue. B&N’s most recent quarterly SEC filing has revealed that they’ve cut funding for Nook Media significantly.

B&N reported that during their third fiscal quarter, which ended on 25 January 2014, the capital expenditures for the Nook were $7.4 million. This represents a decline of 74% from the amount spent on the group in the same period in the previous fiscal year, and over the past 9 months B&N has cut Nook capital expenditures by an average of 55%.

B&N reported a $61 million loss on the Nook that quarter on $157 million in revenue from Nook content and hardware sales.

Part of the reduced expenditures comes from the layoffs which we’ve been reading about for the past several months. B&N confirmed on their conference call with analysts last month that 190 positions had been eliminated as B&N shifts focus from the consumer ebook market to the educational market. They have also been hiring new staff with that goal in mind.

The SEC filing also notes that Barnes & Noble has yet to fully comply with their international obligations to Microsoft, and that B&N is still working towards selling a sufficiency of ebooks in 10 markets. While they did launch the Nook store in 32 countries in 2014, B&N has acknowledged that effort has not reached the “content thresholds” called for by the Microsoft contract. B&N was supposed to hit that milestone by June 2013, and then by the end of the 2013 calendar year, but they believe they will still make their latest deadline of April 2014, when the current fiscal year ends.

Until Barnes & Noble achieves the necessary level, the delay "may entitle Microsoft to defer a portion of advance payments until the target expansion requirement is met." As part of their investment in Nook Media in 2012, Microsoft is paying B&N $25 million annually for five years to help with the international expansion.

PW

Canada’s Competition Bureau announced a settlement last month with 4 publishers to end agency pricing, but it looks like the process isn’t going to go as smooth as one might have expected.

Kobo has filed an objection to the consent decree, and they ask that the settlement be modified so that they are not negatively impacted by the sudden and radical change to the Canadian ebook market.

As part of their filing. Kobo revealed some rather telling details about their business. They blame the end of agency in the US for the loss of their market share, and they predict that the same will happen in Canada.

Kobo’s objection was actually filed 2 weeks ago, but I only got a copy (PDF) yesterday (via Quill and Quire). it’s an interesting read, and if you take it at face value then the future does not bode well for Kobo.

Here are a couple sections from the PDF that spell out how

44. The losses would impact Kobo’s ability to compete in the Canadian market. By analogy, in the US, when Agency Lite was brought into existence, Kobo saw its net revenues steadily decline. Kobo has since stopped investing in marketing in the US, closed its office in Chicago and is focusing on other markets. Its market share and revenues are now negligible there. Although Kobo is a bigger player in the Canadian market, this will not detract from the fact that such significant losses will impact Kobo’s ability to invest in technology and to market its offerings. Regardless of which pricing strategy Kobo chooses to adopt, it expects to be less competitive than it is presently and will lose market share to E-book Retailers who are willing to consistently price their E-books at unsustainably low levels that other competitors simply cannot meet.

45. The harm to the E-book market more broadly will also be significant in that the prohibition on Agency will likely lead to the exit of competitors from the Canadian market and significant financial pressure being brought to bear on the ones who remain. Sony and Barnes & Noble’s respective experiences in the US are illustrative of the negative effect of a ban on Agency. Sony exited the E-book market in the US entirely (and has now had its E-book business acquired by Kobo) , and Barnes & Noble’s NOOK E-book division reported heavy losses fo r the 2013 fiscal year. A ban on Agency, even in the short term, will have a lasting and irreversible negative impact on the market for E-books in Canada.

In short, Kobo is saying that when Amazon was allowed to discount ebooks in the US, Kobo was unable to compete effectively, not even by means other than price (marketing, CS, features, community). This is rather curious because other companies, including Zola Books, The Reading Room, Bilbary, Oyster, and Scribd all seem to be able to compete effectively against Amazon in the US ebook market. Also, (Barnes & Noble saw most of its growth in the pre-agency era, claiming a 20% market share by the end of April 2010. This only grew another 6% to 8% in the following years. )

Perhaps Kobo should buy out one of their smaller competitors and put that smaller competitor in charge of the Kobo ebookstore?

On a related note, if Kobo has only a negligible market share in the US then I have to wonder whether their partners at the ABA, and its IndieBound program, are beginning to regret betting on the losing horse. Indie booksellers who belong to the ABA can take part in an affiliate program and earn a commission on Kobo ebooks and hardware, but if Kobo only has a negligible share of the US ebook market then the booksellers are not generating a lot of revenue.

image by Sean MacEntee

Richard Palombo, writing over at eeevolution.it, has uncovered a couple images on a design website which may or may not be Pocketbook’s next ebook reader.

Few details are available on the Pocketbook Ultra, but according to the description this device has a 6″ Carta E-ink screen, frontlight, touchscreen, and a camera. This device also has page turn buttons on the rear of the case rather than the front, and the camera may or may not have an LED flash.

There’s no word on the CPU, storage, or the camera resolution, and in fact I am still waiting on confirmation that this wasn’t the work of some ambitious design student, but if this ebook reader design is real then it’s going to be the most interesting ereader launched in 2014.

The Ultra would be only the second ereader to get the Carta screen. This is the latest generation E-ink screen, and I was under the impression that it was exclusive to the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite. Kobo doesn’t even have this screen, and we all know that they would have used it on the Kobo Aura if they could have.

Furthermore, this would be the first ebook reader which included a camera as well as the ability to scan books and convert the image to text. This useful feature can be found on many a smartphone, but not on any ereader that I know of.

But is this a design that Pocketbook plans to release or is this merely a concept design which an independent designer created just to explore the idea?

I’m not sure. I have queried Pocketbook for confirmation, and I am waiting for someone to confirm that this is the real deal. While I hope that this is real, I have my doubts. Some details of the design, including the placement of the camera, make me wonder if this design is a independent project and not the work of Pocketbook.

Stay tuned.

Pocketbook has officially launched their new dust and water-resistant ereader, and they’re charging more than I would be willing to pay for it given its limited features and minimal water protection.

This ebook reader is scheduled to be unveiled later this month at the Salon du Livre  in Paris, and it has a projected retail price of 6990 rubles or 109 euros, depending on the market.

When the Pocketbook Aqua leaked last month, I was less than sure that the technical details were accurate or complete. Now that we have the official press release I can confirm that this ereader has a low-resolution E-ink screen, 4GB of storage, Wifi, a touchscreen, but no frontlight or microSD card slot.

It’s also lacking any type of page turn buttons, which were probably dropped from the design in order to simplify the design and make it easier to waterproof it. This is also why there’s no microSD card slot.

The Aqua is also known as the Pocketbook 640, and it runs Pocketbook’s software on a 1GHz CPU with 256MB RAM. It’s going to ship with a broad selection of dictionaries, including quite a few translation dictionaries for Russian, Ukrainian, and European languages. And like Pocketbook’s other ebook readers, the Aqua will offer support for a number of ebook formats, including Epub and PDF.

The Aqua has already been announced for the Russian market, where it will cost 6990 rubles, and for the German market, where it will cost 109 euros. The latter price converts to $149 USD, which is not terribly unreasonable for the market.

Just to give you a comparison, I can get a Kindle Paperwhite that was waterproofed by WaterFi for $219. This firm offers an after market service which waterproof mobile electronics, and they’ve been selling the KPW since May 2013.

WaterFi guarantees their work to a depth of 200 feet, which is a far higher standard than what Pocketbook promises for the Aqua. That ereader is only certified for the IP57 standard, meaning that it can be submerged in up to a meter of water for up to 30 minutes.

P.S. On a related note, it looks like there is a good chance that the Earl back-country tablet will indeed make its way into user’s hands; according to the latest updates its development is progressing, albeit slowly. This device has a ruggedized shell and a flexible 6″ E-ink screen,  making it a much better choice for anyone who plans to use it in unsafe situations. Of course, it is also up for pre-order for $300, but you get what you pay for.

What’s your favorite reading position (he asks suggestively)?

The ebook subscription service 24Symbols took that question and ran with it. A few weeks ago they posted a chart which showed 24 reading positions inspired by famous books.

The titles for each image are in Spanish, but with most of the titles I don’t think that will be an issue.

24Symbols