Re-Kindled: Perhaps I’m Immature #2

It looks like the e-reader market is getting even more interesting – later this month a German company, txtr, will release a Kindle competitor called Beagle at, and get this, £10, almost the same price as a book from Amazon.

So it’s going to be rubbish, right?

Well maybe not. It’s a bit smaller than a Kindle, it’ll only hold a handful of books at a time and it doesn’t have WiFi, USB or a keyboard (you get your books by a bluetooth connection to your mobile) but it’s got a 15 book (AAA) battery life, weighs nothing, has a 600×800 resolutions screen and uses e-ink like Kindle.

The next question, of course, is how much do books cost? Is it the razorblade and razor problem; give away the razor and charge through the nose for a proprietary blade that won’t fit another razor?

Well…..it doesn’t look like it. The device is Android based (IOS coming soon) and will read anything your phone will read – PDF and Adobe Digital Editions included.

txtr have their own book library, a quick glance shows their fiction section has 100,000+ books and prices are either more expensive or cheaper, depending on which books you pick – maybe someone would like to waste an afternoon doing a price comparison for us all………

The thing is, e-readers that are only readers and don’t pretend to be doing anything other than get, store and display black and white text, are going to be dirt cheap; so It looks like this market will, in the end, be content driven – which sounds good for authors and therefore good for readers too.