Barnes & Noble has been exceedingly quiet on the ebook front since it was acquired two years ago. Once it stopped being a publicly traded company, it no longer announced its quarterly revenue, including its ebook sales. The conventional wisdom was that B&N would either shut down or sell off its ebook division, but it would appear that we were mistaken. The retailer just announced that  it was rebranding a 10’1″ Lenovo tablet as the new Nook Tablet. B&N and Lenovo today announced a new NOOK® 10” HD Tablet designed with Lenovo – a stylish yet durable tablet with full metal body ..read more

Color E-ink screens are expensive, and that is doubly true as the dimensions increase. There’s less of a demand for large screens, which means smaller production runs, and consequently higher costs. But those larger screens are available, if you have the funds. I just learned that E-ink is now selling a 31.2″ Kaleido screen unit for $2,300. (You can also buy a grayscale screen for $1,500.) This is just the screen without a controller chip, power regulator, or anything, so it’s really more for the DIYer than consumers, but it is available. E-ink via Liliputing You just finished reading E-ink i ..read more

The new color ereader I told you about last week now has an official model name. It’s now known as the Pocketbook InkPad Color, and according to what I was told by Pocketbook it has a new Kaleido screen with a different color filter pattern which allowed the better contrast and color saturation. The new device also has software tweaks that give it a faster refresh rate. (The 6″ Pocketbook Color, which shipped last summer, had a tolerably fast refresh rate.) It is still limited to only 100 DPI when displaying color, and 300 DPI for grayscale. You can buy it from Newegg for $329. Specs CPU: du ..read more

The Pocketbook 740 will be a great color ereader, but it does have one small quirk that some won’t like: It runs a version of Linux. If you want an ereader that runs Android and has a color E-ink screen, you should look at the Bigme S3. This ereader has a 7.8″ Kaleido E-ink screen with frontlight and capacitive touchscreen. It runs Android 8.1 on an octa-core 1.8GHz CPU with 2GB RAM and 32GB internal storage. That is a lot of RAM, storage, and CPU (and let’s not forget the expensive screen), so it probably will not surprise you that the BigMe S3 costs over $500 at retail. In fact, this ereade ..read more

I was just over at MobileRead, sharing the good news about Kobo’s new ereader, when I found out about the Pocketbook 740. Pocketbook’s third color ereader is going to sport a 7.8″ Kaleido E-ink screen capable of displaying up to 4096 colors. This is the same screen that Onyx wanted to use on the Nova2 Color, but Pocketbook is beating them to the punch. The Pocketbook 740 Color is based on the same hardware as the Inkpad 3 (they even share the same model number). According to Pocketbook’s product page, this device ships with a capacitive touchscreen, frontlight, BT, and Wifi. It runs Pocketboo ..read more

Amazon may have put Kindle development on hold for the duration, but Kobo has not. A new Kobo ereader just showed up on the FCC website this morning. All of the photos have been embargoed, but I was able to confirm the brand, model number, and a few specs. The Kobo N604 was tested for both Bluetooth and Wifi, but I have not been able to find any mention of peripherals (I was kinda hoping for a stylus). Edit: Someone pointed out to me where the 32GB storage is mentioned, so we can add that to the spec list. I know that the usual unreliable source is claiming there’s 32GB of storage and that thi ..read more

I was in Best Buy this morning, buying a  new laptop when I happened to notice that the store now had digital product labels decorating the shelves. Best Buy has bought a shelf label system from a company called Pricer, and deployed labels in the 2″ and 4.2″ size. The larger sizes uses a 3-color Spectra E-ink screen (red, black and white), but I can’t say for sure whether the smaller shelf labels uses that screen or just a regular E-ink screen. One thing I can tell you is that the screens are not as high of a resolution as on your Kindle; the smaller text on the 4.2″ screen was almost ill ..read more

Dasung is quietly famous for developing an E-ink monitor with a 13.3″ screen, and over the years they have released new models with incremental improvements. Now they are making a huge change, and I do mean huge. I was just reading over on Notebook Italia that Dasung has a new model in the works. The Dasung Paperlike 253 is a computer monitor with a 25.3″ E=ink display. Its screen resolution measures an impressive 3200 x 1800, and it will have a frontlight when it ships sometime this year. The price has not been announced, but I do know it will come with a full-size HDMI port and a VESA ..read more

Christmas came late this year, but I have a present for you. I just got an email notification that a new ereader cleared the FCC. This ereader was built by Netronix, but carries the brand MobiScribe, and according to the manual, it is called the Origin. The Origin features a 6.8″ screen with a frontlight that offers color-changing, contrast, and brightness settings. (There’s also a 4th setting which I have not figured out). In addition to the capacitive touchscreen, this ereader also ha a Wacomstylus. According to the test results, the Origin has Wifi but not Bluetooth. The internal photos sh ..read more

The Chinese gadget company Xiaomi  has just launched a crowdfunding campaign for their next ereader. The crowdfunding site is in Chinese, with all the text embedded in images, so it is kinda ahrd to discern many details. But I do know the Mi Reader Pro features a 7.8″ Carta E-ink dispaly with color-changing frontlight. It’s powered by a quadcore CPU with 2GB RAM and 32GB internal storage. Th graphics also suggest that the Mi Reader Pro can pair with a smartphone, and that it supports standard office formats. GSMArena reports that it runs Android Oreo 8.1 and comes with both Wifi and Blue ..read more